Merce cunningham

How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the abstract tendency in post-war American culture, the lover and collaborator of John Cage, Cunningham emptied barefoot dance of ideology, symbolism, plot, personality, pretension: instead it became purely an exploration of bodies in movement, responsive to chance, sound and light. Perhaps Cunningham’s language has been so deeply absorbed into the lexicon of modern dance that it no longer shocks or surprises. But its chaste beauty remains inviolate. Lyon Opera Ballet – France’s equivalent to Rambert – has made a speciality of performing Cunningham, who died in 2009 at the age of

Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy prepping for Raymonda, Tamara Rojo’s lavish new reboot of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. Antony McDonald’s costumes shimmer as vibrantly as his stage design, and Rojo’s choreographic treatment is its own visual feast, packed with pinwheeling set pieces that repackage Petipa’s fearsome technique with their own pizazz. I can’t say the narrative is quite so electric, even with its conscientious redraft, which excises the xenophobia of the original scenario, along with its damsel-in-distress storyline, and trades the 13th century for the 19th, with the Crusades swapped for the Crimean War. In