dance

Murmur/Inked, Aakash Odedra, Patrick Centre, Birmingham

Hanna Weibye Friday, 09 May 2014

It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián.

6000 Miles Away, Sylvie Guillem, Birmingham Hippodrome

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 08 May 2014

When Sylvie Guillem became, at 19, the youngest person ever to reach the top rank of the Paris Opéra, she gained a job title – étoile (star) – that uncannily captured her essence. Most companies call their top dancers principal or prima ballerina or soloist, titles that show they have first place among their peers. Sylvie too stands out among her peers, blessed as she is with an extraordinary body, an extraordinary work ethic, an extraordinary intelligence.

The Tempest Replica, Kidd Pivot, Birmingham Hippodrome

Hanna Weibye Monday, 05 May 2014

If, standing on a station platform, your arms want to make shapes in the air; if, walking home, you are mesmerised by the curved toes of your shoes against the pavement; if, in the kitchen, a stray salad leaf on the floor transforms before your eyes into a tiny green lizard, head up, questioning – then (if you are over the age of 10 and reasonably level-headed) you have probably consumed some mind-altering substance.

Concert Dansé, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Hanna Weibye Monday, 05 May 2014

On the back wall of Birmingham Symphony Hall’s great oval space, two musicians are poised on a glass balcony that gives the illusion of not being there at all. A small square of warm light picks them out, vivid against the hall’s darkness. So framed, Saint-Saëns’ gentle Prière for cello and organ keeps its intimacy even in that large space, the two instruments blending into one equal sound that is clear, golden, and not too sweet.

Quatrain/Kin./Les Rendezvous, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Crescent Theatre

Hanna Weibye Sunday, 27 April 2014

It is proof, as if more were needed, of how very right-on Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director David Bintley is, that he chose to open the International Dance Festival currently taking place in that city with two specially commissioned ballets from emerging choreographers who started their dancing careers with the company: Quatrain by Kit Holder and Kin. by Alexander Whitley.

Rodin, Eifman Ballet, London Coliseum

Hanna Weibye Wednesday, 16 April 2014

Before Boris Eifman’s second visit to London this week, ballet lovers who missed the divisive Russian dancemaker last time round will have been weighing up the merits of a punt on a ticket. If they were basing their calculations on reviews, I imagine their mental reasoning went as follows.

Comment

The Rite of Spring & Petrushka, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells

Hanna Weibye Saturday, 12 April 2014

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captures the pulsing terror of seasonal change, the relentless onward drive of nature that brings death closer even as life burns at its most ferocious. The 1913 première of the ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky infamously caused a riot in its Parisian audience. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s version for his company Fabulous Beast has terrifying dog heads and men furiously humping the ground.

The Winter's Tale, Royal Ballet

Hanna Weibye Friday, 11 April 2014

Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on the First World War, though the two evenings succeed and fail in almost equal measure.

tauberbach, les ballets C de la B, Sadler's Wells

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 10 April 2014

Belgian Alain Platel makes the kind of dance theatre (like Pina Bausch, to whom he has an oft-remarked debt) for which both “dance” and “theatre” are very loose and inadequate umbrella terms. “Sets” are often jaw-dropping colonisations of stage space; there are no flats or drops painted to resemble other things, but huge quantities of actual stuff with which the dancers interact.

Lest We Forget, English National Ballet, Barbican

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 03 April 2014

Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through.