Royal ballet

Thrilling debuts, starry guests and a tear-stained farewell at Covent Garden this week as the Royal Ballet closed the season with a triple bill of works by Sir Frederick Ashton. The company’s founder choreographer could often be spotted lurking at the back of the house during Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty enjoying ‘a private lesson’. Today’s would-be narrative dancemakers could gain similar benefits from The Dream, which distils Shakespeare’s five acts into 55 minutes of witty, characterful dance. Steven McRae’s Oberon made short work of Mendelssohn’s Scherzo with icy pirouettes melting into deep penchées and turns chained so tight and fast he should wear asbestos slippers. Marcelino Sambé added a spicy

A Covent Garden barfly was scanning her programme during the first interval: ‘Oh yes, the one about the gynaecologist.’ She meant Strapless, of course, an attempt to tell the back story to John Singer Sargent’s ‘Portrait of Madame X’, which scandalised the Paris Salon of 1884. ‘Madame X’ was Amélie Gautreau, a Creole beauty who became the trophy wife of a Paris banker (and bat-guano importer). Impressed by Sargent’s striking portrait of her lover, the surgeon and saloniste Samuel-Jean Pozzi, Mme Gautreau agreed to let the fashionable young artist immortalise her own cadaverous allure. Bad idea. Her brazen pose and the fallen strap of her low-cut gown caused lasting damage

A tragic flaw is one thing — every hero should have one — but Mayerling’s Rudolf, a syphilitic drug addict with a mother fixation and a death wish, is a very hard man to love. Kenneth MacMillan’s 1978 ballet, currently being revived at Covent Garden, tells the complex tale of the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary and his 1889 suicide pact with his teenage mistress. The narrative unfolds in flashback with cinematic sweep to a cunning patchwork of 30 Franz Liszt compositions invisibly mended by John Lanchbery. The grandeur of the Viennese court is deftly sketched by designer Nicholas Georgiadis. Vast interiors are evoked with a swath of fabric and the

A trio of dazzling scores, the soft clack of gemstones on hips and collarbones, a glittering parure of solos, duets and ensembles: George Balanchine’s Jewels returns to the Covent Garden repertoire to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The ballet’s three plotless elements celebrate the various facets of classical dance. ‘Emeralds’, set to snatches of Gabriel Fauré, pays lyrical homage to ‘the France of elegance, comfort, dress, perfume’. The American-accented ‘Rubies’ riffs on Stravinsky’s 1929 Capriccio for piano and orchestra, and ‘Diamonds’ joins forces with Tchaikovsky in an exultant hymn of praise to the classical ballerina (a role shared on Saturday by Lauren Cuthbertson and a sublime Marianela Nuñez). The Royal Ballet,

The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their joints attached to tiny spotlights, began to colonise the far end of the hall, forming fresh constellations with every pose. The audience smiled in wonder, like tots at a planetarium. Tree of Codes, which had its London première at Sadler’s Wells last week, was originally commissioned in 2015 for the Manchester International Festival. It combined the talents of Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, mixer and DJ Jamie xx and the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The trio took as their text Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which

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

The Romanovs were a hot topic in 1967: it was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, memories of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar winning Anastasia were still fresh and Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra was on every bestseller list. Kenneth MacMillan was ‘sick to death of fairy tales’ and his one act treatment of the Anna Anderson story, with its groundbreaking use of archive film and uncompromising Martinu score, was a ballet for grown ups that wrestled with the very nature of human identity. Lynn Seymour, the greatest dance actress of her generation, created the role of the mental patient who might (or might not) be a Grand Duchess and the

For almost 60 years, whatever the political weather, Russia and Britain have maintained mutually assured respect as far as ballet is concerned. In October 1956, the Soviet Union finally allowed its Bolshoi troupe to appear in the west, in London, a state cultural exchange that should have entailed the debut of the comparatively green Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Russia within weeks. Owing to the inconvenient appearance of Soviet tanks in rebellious Hungary, it wasn’t until 1961 that the renamed Royal Ballet turned up in Moscow. (Khrushchev gushed admiringly, ‘Look at those girls — they might be Russian!’) I looked up The Spectator’s October 1956 review of that Bolshoi debut: some

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

If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s accountable — to shareholders, to the fans. The director of the Royal Ballet is not a football manager. Nor is it easy to see to whom he would account for his plans and outcomes. The Royal Ballet governors are not like MotD panels unleashing Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers on the play, or select committees foaming with Tom Watsons and John Whittingdales demanding explanations for the cultural strategy. They are a group of veteran ballet chums, and it appears to be inconceivable that it is their business to turn round

Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced a ballet by a woman, and wanted to see what women would produce. Just the two begged questions here. First, that female choreographers are being stifled by institutionalised sexism in the ballet establishment. Second, that female choreographers, if allowed to see the light of day, would offer a differently thought, differently imagined argument from the general tenor of those pesky male choreographers who dominate the stage. The first assumption has been swallowed whole by the luminaries and enablers of the art world who flooded Twitter after the première with ecstatic

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

How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer Sargent’s magnetic, enigmatic portrait of Madame X, all alabaster skin, black dress and arrogantly sexy profile. A Mark-Anthony Turnage-commissioned score, a top-prestige Bolshoi co-production, and enough scenery to rebuild Canary Wharf. If only Christopher Wheeldon’s new Covent Garden ballet Strapless were a scandal, like the portrait itself when originally unveiled in Paris in 1884, or like Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at its première. If only it could be dubbed a tasteless exhibition of an undesirable type of female. Instead, it’s just a polite little flop, vastly over-decorated, overcomplicated, and with a

How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s unfashionable, it’s only the Arts Council he has to please. When the world wants a piece of him, he has London’s Sadler’s Wells and the Roundhouse, Grenoble, Paris, Luxembourg, Montreal, Hong Kong, Taipei, Wolfsburg, Brighton, Amiens, Bruges, Amsterdam, Rheims and Leicester producers all tugging at his sleeve, offering support for the quasi-divine creation but wanting to get their spanner into the works somewhere. In which light I take my hat off to Khan. A fortnight after seeing his Until The Lions at the Roundhouse, ground down at the time by

Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances with scientists is over. If you’ve an aversion to digital fidgets and have felt left out in recent years, you will wallow in stories galore this year. There are big new ballets coming about The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre; of which Mark Bruce’s boldly miniaturised The Odyssey, launching into Britain’s county theatres next month before fetching up at Wilton’s Music Hall, is a most alluring prospect. Last year we saw from both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, the Royal Ballet’s master-stylists of crisp abstract ballet, an enthusiastic rush to reinvent

For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent majority out there who daren’t speak for fear of the Twitter ordure that would fall on them. The box office and the empty seats attest to them. You’ll have not the smallest difficulty in booking coachloads in for any of the 11 performances remaining as I write. The curious thing is that the revival of this ballet some 30 years after it last fluttered in Covent Garden came about because of overwhelming public demand, says the Royal Ballet’s artistic director Kevin O’Hare. It remains obscure how this public demand was

The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at the Royal Ballet for choreographers and dancers is making this autumn in Bow Street a test of loyalty. At his season press conference Royal Ballet artistic director Kevin O’Hare smilingly promised us that the 2020 season might contain only works made in the past ten years. God preserve us. Two of the autumn’s three bills so far have been mixed programmes dominated by new or recent in-house contemporary ballets, and only Liam Scarlett’s Viscera, in the current bill, should be longlisted for 2020. The rest should be longlisted for other

You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first Romeo as a thunderclap. So the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare, for reasons best known to himself, gives the most exciting new young star the Royal Ballet has seen for years the role of Juliet and…Matthew Golding as Romeo. And so it was that Francesca Hayward’s mesmerising debut in this most prized of all Royal ballerina roles will be remembered as a bomb exploding in a vacuum. This Juliet will have to hunt for a new Romeo to find her match; she will have better nights to remember than that

There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The violence of the subject was matched by the goings-on in the wings, the scrap over the first-night casting, in which the original Juliet, the young Lynn Seymour, found herself relegated down the list having had an abortion to take the role. Due to Machiavellian box-office politics, the première was staged with Fonteyn and Nureyev as the young lovers, and rising star MacMillan, horrified at being steamrollered, quit the Royal Ballet. None of the smell of blood and fury survives in the Royal Ballet’s scrupulously scrubbed-down 50th anniversary staging. Though there