dance

Slava's Snowshow, Royal Festival Hall

Ismene Brown Thursday, 29 December 2011

Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy.

The Nutcracker, Birmingham Royal Ballet, O2 Arena

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 28 December 2011

It would always be a risk putting such a gossamer Christmas charmer as The Nutcracker into a gargantuan Mammonite cavern like the O2 Arena, where magic only counts if it rings loudly in the coffers - car park £25! programmes £10! As with the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet last June, Birmingham Royal Ballet have put up a cinema screen to enable thousands of viewers far away to catch what looks dolls-house-sized in real view.

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Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, New Adventures, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Ismene Brown Thursday, 15 December 2011

Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?

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The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Ismene Brown Friday, 09 December 2011

I don't want to get the blues at The Nutcracker of all ballets. It should be all snow and Christmas, flowers and presents, firelight, moonlight, candlelight and unearthly brilliance.

The Nutcracker, Royal Ballet

Judith Flanders Sunday, 04 December 2011

The Nutcracker, if this isn’t too much of a mixed culinary metaphor, divides audiences like Marmite: love it or hate it. Usually it’s the critics who hate it, and for them it is often only the annual round of Nuts to be Cracked that wears on the soul. It is hard to imagine, otherwise, that anyone with functioning ears can fail to be thrilled as what is arguably Tchaikovsky’s greatest orchestral work begins to swell from the pit.

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UnDance, Mark-Anthony Turnage/Wayne McGregor/Mark Wallinger, Sadler’s Wells

Judith Flanders Friday, 02 December 2011

It is unusual in art for collaborators to be of equal star-wattage. The pairing of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden was one such. Another, much longer-lasting, was Stravinsky and Balanchine, a partnership of equals that endured for nearly half a century. More recently, Antony Gormley has worked with both Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, to great effect.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Jérôme Bel, 3Abschied, Sadler’s Wells

Judith Flanders Tuesday, 22 November 2011

When the subject of funding for the arts arises, the phrase “allowed to fail” is frequently heard: artists must be enabled to try new things, press against the outer edges of what they know. Enter Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Jérôme Bel, two of contemporary dance’s thinkers. They have tried, and failed, to choreograph the final section of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and in that attempt, they have produced an extraordinary evening: the anatomy of a failure.

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Royal Ballet, Asphodel Meadows/Enigma Variations/Gloria

Judith Flanders Sunday, 20 November 2011

“Over the top” is a curious expression. Originating in World War One, to mean going over the edge of a trench and into battle, it has altered by degrees to mean anything extravagant or outrageous. And Gloria, which is arguably Kenneth MacMillan’s masterpiece, has both the literal and figurative meanings of going over the top layered upon each other.

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Rambert: RainForest/ Seven For A Secret/ Elysian Fields, Sadler’s Wells

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Rambert is making a thing of acquiring classic works from the 20th-century contemporary repertory – and a very good thing, too. First staged by them last year, RainForest, a minor Merce Cunningham piece from 1968, was recently performed by the Cunningham company itself, in London on its final tour. And yet, while that performance was straight from the horse’s mouth, I think Rambert (whisper it) in reality do it better.

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Can We Talk About This?, DV8 Physical Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre

Ismene Brown Thursday, 10 November 2011

Some of the bravest people in theatre operate in the dance world. Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 production, Can We Talk About This?, tackles just as contentious and satirically explosive a subject as Javier de Frutos did in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, the luridly anti-Papist work that got him death threats and a BBC ban in 2009.