Dance

In the early Noughties there was a Hollywood subgenre (by which I mean a few cult movies, each with terrible sequels) about ballerinas who shake off their classical shackles and liberate the cool girl within. The crown jewel is Center Stage, in which an aspiring prima sticks it to her ballet masters after they affront her with some light criticism of her turnout. She’s not some faceless, uptight swan! She’s a free spirit who dances for fun, as signalled by the presence of not one but two Jamiroquai songs on the soundtrack. When Tiler Peck strutted on screen to James Blake’s ‘Buzzard & Kestrel’ in the opening minutes of The

Thank God for the fast-forward button. Sadler’s Wells had planned a tentative return to live performance last month but the renewed lockdown forced a rethink and the programme was niftily reconfigured for the small screen. The result, Dancing Nation, is a generous serving of old, new and borrowed work from 15 UK dance-makers. Unfortunately the BBC’s three hour-long iPlayer films pad out the dance content with interviews and mission statements plus non-stop Yentobbing from the inevitable talking head. Brenda Emmanus, one-time frontwoman of BBC’s The Clothes Show, speaks fluent presenterese, emphasising every other word and greeting each number with kindergarten delight: ‘What a treat we have for you!… Another thought-provoking,

How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we emerge, as the Navajo think, from a cloud of coloured mist? Or do we listen to the ancient Egyptians who thought the curtain opened on a giant cobra slithering across the oceans? Perhaps it starts with a computer screen: Milky Way wallpaper, a folder labelled ‘History_Of_Universe’ and a sharp intake of breath. That’s how one of the great video artworks of the 21st century begins anyway. This summer New York’s Museum of Modern Art uploaded Camille Henrot’s ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013) to its YouTube channel. It gives you the birth of

Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often illuminating, certainly long — and perhaps a bit too reverent for its own good. The programme began with some of today’s jazz musicians testifying to just how great the club is. From there, we cut to the story of Scott himself, with his Jewish East End background and his early love of the saxophone. By 16, he was accomplished enough to cross the frontier from East End to West, and played in various swing bands. But then he and his fellow 1940s hipsters discovered bebop, a reaction against commercialised swing

Ballet lovers driven square-eyed by a drip feed of livestreaming and archive footage have been pining for the patter of tiny satin feet. Last month the UK’s big ballet companies began to emerge from hibernation, playing small-scale work to thin, socially distanced houses. Some, such as Birmingham Royal and English National ballets, took the opportunity to broaden their audience’s conservative tastes with otherwise tricky-to-shift programmes of new work. Others, like the Royal and Northern ballets, offered choreographic comfort food. After testing the waters with last month’s Back on Stage gala, danced before an audience of 400 dance students and health workers, the Royal Ballet began its autumn season with two

When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans for his inaugural season, but the pandemic swiftly derailed these. Lazuli Sky, recently performed for live audiences in Birmingham and London, is his first commission to come to fruition, and while the programme has been scaled down from its original incarnation — with fewer dancers, musicians and audience members — it lives up to the panache of the company’s usual mixed bills and even manages to pull off a world première by Will Tuckett, a lodestar of contemporary British ballet. The titular work, Lazuli Sky, is Tuckett’s ode to nature’s

Dancing at Dusk captures the final rehearsal of a new version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. It’s only the third time a company other than Bausch’s own has been handed the reins to this piece, and it’s a treat to see its raw, convulsive rhythms reinterpreted by a new generation of performers. Filmed on a beach in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, it features a cast of 38 dancers from 14 African countries, assembled to bring a fresh lens to Bausch’s 1975 cult classic, itself a modern reckoning of a decades-old ballet. (Bausch’s original famously underscores the misogyny of the sacrificial virgin, doomed to dance herself to death.) This collaboration

Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed in real time from an empty auditorium — to come out of Covent Garden since March. Unaware that recordings would be available afterwards, I clung to these fleeting displays with the panic of grandparents on a Zoom call, furiously, helplessly slapping the screen whenever it buffered. Both are quick ballet interludes to longer opera programmes — not afterthoughts, exactly, but not centrepieces either, though with two shirtless danseurs and a beloved ballerina between them, they do just fine asserting their presence. Vadim ‘the Dream’ Muntagirov tackles the Ashton work, reaffirming

The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is And Then We Danced, a gay love story set in Tbilisi, Georgia, and it is truly wonderful and gorgeous. Every cloud and all that. However, in my area the demand on broadband is so high that all I get is buffering, buffering, buffering, like it’s 1996, so the only way I could watch this in its entirety was by getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was an absolute pleasure then, it’ll be an absolute pleasure anytime. It passed the 5 a.m. test, you could say. Some scene are

It must have been hard for Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young to live up to the success of 2016’s devastating Betroffenheit. In Revisor, their imaginative retelling of Nikolai Gogol’s satirical comedy of errors The Government Inspector (Revizor in the original Russian), Pite and Young draw on familiar techniques: dancers from Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, lip-sync to actors’ voiceovers, their movements synchronising with, or playing off, the text. Ghoulish and farcical, Pite’s choreography is knife-sharp, the performers eye-wateringly good. Imagine watching a stage full of puppets, twitching without strings, sashaying between menace and campy drama. Rena Narumi, as thuggish Interrogator Klak, and Tiffany Tregarthen as the skittish Revisor (voiced by Young

The Bright Stream is a ballet about a collective farm. Forget everything you know about collectivism — the failed harvests, the famines — this is Soviet agriculture without mud or hunger. The Bright Stream, which opened in Leningrad in 1935, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s attempt to write a ‘socialist realist’ ballet. Our heroine is Zina (Daria Khoklova), the Bright Stream Collective’s Morale Officer. The curtain rises on a scene of sunny, saturated bounty: hay stooks, horns of plenty, pumpkins as big as cartwheels. Tractors soar across the backcloth like three flying ducks. This is collectivism in white tights and Liberty print. The plot is batty. Ekaterina Krysanova and Ruslan Skvortsov are