contemporary dance
FAR, Wayne McGregor|Random Dance, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 20 March 2012
This is a great spring for dance-lovers. Tucked in for two nights at Sadler's Wells (catch it again tonight) is the return of Wayne McGregor's FAR, well timed to appear just before his latest ballet at Covent Garden next week. Uniquely among... Read more... |
Richard Alston Dance Company, Sadler’s WellsThursday, 01 March 2012
The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for... Read more... |
Men in Motion, Sadler's Wells TheatreSaturday, 28 January 2012
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that... Read more... |
2011: Ballerinas, Cuts and the Higgs Boson TheorySaturday, 31 December 2011
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell... Read more... |
UnDance, Mark-Anthony Turnage/Wayne McGregor/Mark Wallinger, Sadler’s WellsFriday, 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... Read more... |
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Jérôme Bel, 3Abschied, Sadler’s WellsTuesday, 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... Read more... |
Rambert: RainForest/ Seven For A Secret/ Elysian Fields, Sadler’s WellsWednesday, 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... Read more... |
Richard Alston Dance Company, Focus on Alston, The PlaceFriday, 21 October 2011
Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons... Read more... |
Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 19 October 2011
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist... Read more... |
Armitage Gone! Dance, Queen Elizabeth HallWednesday, 12 October 2011
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics... Read more... |
Beyoncé stole my moves, says high priestess of modern danceTuesday, 11 October 2011
Has the great pop diva Beyoncé plagiarised the great modern dance diva Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker? This is the burning question that has today sent disco popsters and fans of austere contemporary dance in a feverish crush to YouTube, comparing... Read more... |
Emanuel Gat Dance, Brilliant Corners, Sadler’s WellsMonday, 10 October 2011
“Jazz is my adventure,” said Thelonious Monk. “I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.” Based on the title of the new hour-long piece by Israeli... Read more... |
