Dance
La Valse/ Invitus Invitam/ Winter Dreams/ Theme & Variations, Royal BalletFriday, 15 October 2010![]() The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia... Read more... |
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Cow Piece/ Akram Khan, Vertical Road, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 13 October 2010![]() The annual Dance Umbrella festival is mostly for the dance industry to talk to itself, I’ve come to feel, with a timetable so closely packed that only Londoners, and specifically those in the tight roaring circle of the know, will get to sample much... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet in Opera and BalletSunday, 10 October 2010![]() Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National... Read more... |
The Art of Touch/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Wycombe SwanWednesday, 06 October 2010![]() The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new... Read more... |
Stephen Petronio Company, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 06 October 2010![]() Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (... Read more... |
From the Ballets Russes, BFIFriday, 01 October 2010![]() This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time... Read more... |
Onegin, Royal BalletThursday, 30 September 2010![]() One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with... Read more... |
Production Gallery: Russell Maliphant's AfterLightThursday, 30 September 2010![]() New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the... Read more... |
Russell Maliphant Company, AfterLight, Sadler's WellsThursday, 30 September 2010![]() We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a... Read more... |
Birmingham Royal Ballet, Pointes of View, Birmingham HippodromeTuesday, 28 September 2010![]() It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties... Read more... |
Behind the Scene at the Museum: The Staging of the Diaghilev ExhibitionSunday, 26 September 2010![]() The show's curator Jane Pritchard revealed this wonderful kitchen story in a unique walk-round with theartsdesk this week. Her two-year hunt ranged from Diaghilev's passport to glorious Nijinsky costumes, from the Ballets Russes accounts book to... Read more... |
Scottish Ballet, Geometry + Grace, Edinburgh Festival TheatreFriday, 24 September 2010![]() Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener... Read more... |
