Dance
Birthday Offering/ A Month in the Country/ Les Noces, Royal BalletMonday, 02 July 2012
A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must... Read more... |
Água, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 30 June 2012
It opens with a siren saying she’s got cramp. She’s glad she’s got cramp because she can stay outside and enjoy the sky. It closes with people blowing water at each other, glugged from plastic bottles. In between nothing happens.Well, that’s not... Read more... |
The Grand Tour/ Faster/ The Dream, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeThursday, 28 June 2012
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of... Read more... |
Sadler's Wells Theatre, 2012-13 SeasonWednesday, 27 June 2012
A new Sleeping Beauty from the iconoclastic dance showman Matthew Bourne headlines Sadler's Wells Theatre's new season. Climaxing a year of celebrating Bourne's engaging talent - his Play Without Words plays the Wells' summer, following a tour of... Read more... |
The Arts Desk wins Best Specialist Journalism Site of 2012Monday, 25 June 2012
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The... Read more... |
RIP dance critic John PercivalMonday, 25 June 2012John Percival, one of the heavyweight group of dance critics of the past 60 years, died last Wednesday, aged 85. He had watched and reported on ballet and dance from their infancy in the Forties right up to recent years, offering a powerful... Read more... |
Dance critic John Percival, RIPMonday, 25 June 2012John Percival, one of the heavyweight group of dance critics of the past 60 years, died last Wednesday, aged 85. He had watched and reported on ballet and dance from their infancy in the Forties right up to recent years, offering a powerful... Read more... |
Nefés, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsMonday, 25 June 2012
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men... Read more... |
Bamboo Blues, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 23 June 2012
Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. The first half unfolds against a backdrop of white muslin curtains rippling in the wind... Read more... |
Rare footage of ballet legend Anna Pavlova in BFI seasonThursday, 21 June 2012The legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova is to be celebrated in a season of rare footage of her life and career at the BFI in August. A longtime Londoner who was buried near her Highgate home in 1931, the dancer is the subject of a book, Anna Pavlova:... Read more... |
Der Fensterputzer, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler’s WellsTuesday, 19 June 2012
It may be that designer Peter Pabst is the unsung hero of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s “World Cities” extravaganza. When the lights go down at Sadler’s Wells for Der Fensterputzer (The Window-washer), the stage is dominated by a vast mountain of glowing... Read more... |
Ten Chi, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreMonday, 18 June 2012
The Japanese dance public is overwhelmingly female, so it’s not surprising that Pina Bausch’s paean to Saitama, Ten Chi, is so girly. The fourth in the series of “World Cities” that’s sold out London’s two great dance centres, the Barbican and... Read more... |
