Dance

Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re betraying you, defying orders or throwing themselves into the arms of the nearest unsuitable suitor. What happens when that suitor is a god, or — god forbid — their own brother or sister? Answers came on the back of two very different operatic postcards this week. At the Barbican, bathtime gone bad. A claw-foot bath sits centre stage, a cold, white womb in which monstrous twins writhe in fleshy ecstasy. Backs arched, legs flexed into Priapic verticals, they coalesce the clenching pulse of orgasm and the surging agony of childbirth

From a film about ballet to a ballet about film. In reworking the 1948 Powell and Pressburger classic The Red Shoes for his latest show, Matthew Bourne pays homage to far more than the unforgettable story of a budding ballerina and the bloody toll of her choice between love and career. With the glee of George Lucas recreating second world war dogfights in space, Bourne, a cinéphile since childhood, stuffs his Red Shoes with images from Hollywood’s Golden Age: a French Riviera coast here, a battered old piano there, fur coats and train whistles and sequin-and-feather tap-dancers. The problem with this love letter to cinema is that it blunts the

Giselle endures in the collective imagination as a charming, sorrowful, supernatural love story. Premièred in Paris in 1841, this keystone romantic ballet concerns a peasant girl whose trust in a disguised nobleman destroys her fragile mind and heart. Little wonder, given the ballet’s mixture of sunniness, deception, spooky woe and redemption, that it retains a timeless grip or that the title role has become the ballerina equivalent of Hamlet. English National Ballet will be at the London Coliseum in January performing Mary Skeaping’s Giselle, a chilling and historically accurate version originally mounted by the company in 1971. But first comes Akram Khan’s brand new take, another savvy commission by ENB’s

For a regular dancegoer in New York City, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater seasons arrive with the comforting predictability of a Christmas Nutcracker. Superb dancers, Ailey’s sublime Revelations, jubilant audiences, stirring evocations of African-American identity: it’s easy to begin to take these things for granted. When you haven’t seen the Ailey company for a while, a season packed with these riveting dancers is a newly wondrous thing, a fresh discovery of the particularity that makes the troupe both a cultural and historic phenomenon. The company’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre season, which opened on the 6 September and runs through to the 17th, is the start of a six-week UK tour.

Crystal Pite, the Canadian dancemaker who combines intellectual, emotional and physical intelligence in rare degree, is classically trained, but her work is most often made for and performed by contemporary companies. Hence the attraction of this Edinburgh International Festival programme. Scottish Ballet, in the European premiere of a piece Pite made for the National Ballet of Canada in 2009, offered a rare chance to see how her distinctive sensibility plays on the refined bodies of a classical company, and promised to whet the appetite for her upcoming creation for the Royal Ballet in March next year. Emergence confronts explicitly the tension between Pite’s experiences of working with contemporary dancers in

The second half of the Bolshoi tour brought much fresher fare than the first: following the ubiquitous warhorses Don Quixote and Swan Lake, we got three jolly nights of Moscow speciality: an iffy Shakespeare comedy nailed by superb performing, a giddy rewrite of Stalin’s favourite ballet and a breathtakingly fruity restoration of a 19th-century ballet entertainment, with pirate ships, dancing gardens and a vision of the hedonistic life of abducted women somewhat at odds with Boko Haram’s. The sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew are potentially tricky for ballet since the woman is physically dependent on the man. But Monte Carlo choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot was quite smart

What’s the best first opera for a sceptical adult first timer? It’s a favourite topic among opera buffs, and once you get past the assumption that novices need to be spoon-fed familiar tunes, the consensus — slightly surprisingly — often settles on Jenufa. Surprisingly? Well, yes: Janacek still isn’t guaranteed box office (maybe people conflate that spiky Czech name with a mental picture of Eastern bloc bleakness). In fact, this is a piece that can upend every lazy prejudice about the form: a concentrated plot, a concise running time, and no heroes or villains, just believable characters with painfully human failings. And all set to music that never judges, never

The Bolshoi Ballet’s wunderkind ballerina Natalia Osipova defied received wisdom when, in 2012, she cast off from the great Moscow company with her equally prodigious then boyfriend and partner Ivan Vasiliev to go freelance. Without the Bolshoi’s unmatched support system, its coaching and opportunities, its reputation behind her, protested the Russian media, how could she thrive? Much the same was said over here the following year when the Royal Ballet’s precocious young star, the matchlessly graceful, imperiously aquiline Sergei Polunin thumbed his nose at a cornucopia of Covent Garden leading roles and skipped off to an uncertain future trailing behind him incoherent tweets about wanting to run a tattoo parlour.

Paradoxically, some ballet masterworks absolutely depend on tiptop performing to demonstrate how great they are. If they don’t get it, they can look like the dodgiest of curiosities — did people in those days really rate this stuff? A whole genre of fiercely zipped tragedies of feeling emerged in Britain and the US in the 1930s and 1940s, fed by Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann over here, and Martha Graham and José Limón over there; works that, unlike classical dance, require acting skills of rare force and perfect pitch. And this genre can be difficult to restage these days, when we tend to react ruthlessly to work that

Was Tamara Rojo, when she danced Swan Lake last Saturday at the Albert Hall, thinking as she shaped each phrase, ‘This will be the last time I dance this …and this …and this’? I wonder. She told me a few years back that she had a five-year diary to cover the rest of her dancing career, a diary ending in 2016. Akram Khan’s modern Giselle this autumn will be a Rojo role, but if at 42 she was privately saying farewell to her classical career on Saturday, she did it with the spectacular and refined artistry the public has come to expect. A woman sitting next to me complained that

The difference between a poor ballet of the book (see the Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein) and a good one — indeed two — was cheeringly pointed up by Northern Ballet last week, when it unveiled an intensely imagined new Jane Eyre in Doncaster and gave the London première of the efficiently menacing 1984 that I reviewed last autumn. It wasn’t really a surprise that Cathy Marston had a triumph with the Brontë —Royal Ballet-raised but Europe-bred, the choreographer has gradually developed a knack for character empathy and, crucially, a gift for externalising inner feelings in a vividly legible way. So although Jane Eyre is such a literary story, with every emotional

Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until he agreed to do a new Swan Lake is difficult to understand given the meh results. Dawson is a polite, undemonstrative choreographer, and his lack of enthusiasm has rather predictably produced an asthenic result. Obviously, abandon thoughts of white swans, or royalty, or Matthew Bourne’s brilliant, vaudevillian 1995 rewrite. This is, literally, a grey production in every way — or rather greyed-out, as if it were the ghost of something that was functional but is now impotent. Dawson doesn’t display the theatrical or choreographic skills here that would have made

Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a combination of exorbitant expense and a languid disdain for the little Britons with their Johnny-come-lately ballet tradition (not even one century old, let alone three and a half). So if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, it behoves Mahomet to go to the mountain. And now is the time to do it, with the ructions brought on by the arrival last year and the departure this of Natalie Portman’s husband as ballet artistic director. Benjamin Millepied is French but spent his career as a leading dancer in New York City

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was a witch who would leave him forever haunted, sick and bereft. You can remodel this fantasy this way and that, switch the genders, reconfigure death, sleep and hallucination, and come up with Giselle, La Sylphide, Swan Lake, La Bayadère in the 19th century, and then find Fokine, Balanchine and Ashton developing it into the 20th

You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and reputations built. But seeing Kaash again last week, Akram Khan’s tremendous debut ensemble work, made when he was 26, revived at Sadler’s Wells now that he is 41 and a world name, I felt the earth move just as before. Like Athene, born fully armed from Zeus’s head, Kaash leapt astonishingly out of the modest, watchful mind of Khan, then a superb classical Indian soloist embarking on his first choreography for other dancers. One of the great pleasures of this past fortnight for a veteran dancegoer has been seeing his