tue 01/07/2025

contemporary ballet

Rambert Triple Bill, Sadler's Wells

After a busy year, moving their headquarters from Chiswick to new premises on the South Bank, Rambert dance company have managed to keep momentum working with stalwarts such as Ashley Page and Mark Baldwin as well as branching out with...

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Bintley Triple Bill, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells

Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into...

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Sylvie Guillem, 6000 Miles Away, Sadler's Wells Theatre

People go to see Sylvie Guillem the way they used to go to Isadora Duncan or Anna Pavlova, to see a living legend, a game-changer. Guillem became one of dance’s handful of game-changers not when she was the controversially over-fashioned classical...

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Nacho Duato, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London Coliseum

The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two...

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2013), Royal Ballet

Art is a fickle subject – hence why many preeminent philosophers offer different theories as to how we can begin to understand the opposing effect the same object or creation can have on different people. Many can be mildly affected by a given...

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BalletBoyz, The Talent 2013, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Fifteen years ago two male ballet dancers took the awesome risk of leaving the Royal Ballet with an idea in their head about independence. Their first venture was a new Japanese ballet company, which quickly lost their interest as it hit a...

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Ballet Black, Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Ballet Black open their eighth Linbury Studio Theatre season with a quadruple bill of new works which looks promising on paper but less so in actuality. The evening begins with Robert Binet’s EGAL, the title being a (now obsolete) Middle English...

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Viscera/Infra/Fool's Paradise, Royal Ballet

A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In...

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A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet, Sadler's Wells

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire carries with it an enormous loading from its past, the associations with those iconic performers on stage and screen Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh not the least of them. For a narrative dance, that...

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Artifact, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Sadler's Wells

William Forsythe's position as the most articulate, fascinating, provocative ballet choreographer of the past 25 years is demonstrated by the Royal Ballet of Flanders' brief visit to Sadler's Wells for three nights with his epic, maddening,...

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Polyphonia/ Sweet Violets/ Carbon Life, Royal Ballet

All year we've had to wait for a world premiere, and two come along at once. Last night was built to make some noise about the three most impressive young names in Royal Ballet choreography, and that will be where the PR story ends, but not where...

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Anna Karenina, Eifman Ballet of St Petersburg, London Coliseum

An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna...

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