London Coliseum
Nacho Duato, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London ColiseumTuesday, 09 April 2013
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... Read more... |
Giselle, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London ColiseumWednesday, 27 March 2013
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual... Read more... |
Aladdin, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London ColiseumThursday, 21 March 2013
“Possibly the least ‘deep’ ballet I’ve ever made” - these are the words that David Bintley uses to describe his latest full-length work Aladdin, and they make rather a discouraging start to any evening. "Light" isn’t necessarily bad – work created... Read more... |
Russian Ballet Icons Gala: Celebrating Vaslav Nijinsky, London ColiseumMonday, 11 March 2013
What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and... Read more... |
The Barber of Seville, English National OperaTuesday, 26 February 2013
There is only one rule by which one should ever judge a Barber of Seville. If your eyes (and possibly also your trouser legs) aren’t moist by the time the interval arrives, you might as well leave. The last time this Jonathan Miller production was... Read more... |
La Traviata, English National OperaSunday, 03 February 2013
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama... Read more... |
Bankruptcy won't stop the balletMonday, 28 January 2013
The Mikhailovsky Ballet's general director, Russia's fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, may just have been declared bankrupt, but the company is pressing ahead with its star-studded London trip in March. Fraud investigators last week raided the... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 11 January 2013
If anyone who saw Matthew Bourne’s irreverent rewrite of The Sleeping Beauty currently at Sadler’s Wells is curious about the original classical ballet, they’ll find it in rousing glory and glinting style with English National Ballet at the Coliseum... Read more... |
Dance: The Best of 2012Saturday, 29 December 2012
Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular... Read more... |
The Nutcracker 3D, Mariinsky Ballet/ The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumThursday, 13 December 2012
The seasonal Nuts-fest continues (and culminates) with another two to add to the roast – live: English National Ballet’s recent production, and digital: the Mariinsky Theatre’s 3D film version. To the cinema we go. This is the first 3D Nutcracker... Read more... |
Julietta, English National OperaTuesday, 18 September 2012
Pick the right dream, and you just might retrieve a precious memory, even in nightmarish terrain where everyone else has lost theirs. That message seems to have been uncannily prophetic for Bohuslav Martinů, who began work on Julietta in 1936, soon... Read more... |
Billy Budd, English National OperaTuesday, 19 June 2012
It should be hard to make Britten’s Billy Budd a bloodless, passionless, contextless bore, shouldn’t it? This is after all a lacerating story about men behaving badly on a fighting ship in the 1797 wars between Britain and Revolutionary France, a... Read more... |
