thu 10/07/2025

Sadler's Wells

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

Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance...

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Contemporary Dance Weekend, BBC Four

A night in with contemporary dance on telly: Too much explanation

Yesterday was a day when male physicality and the science of movement preoccupied - when you watch Rafa Nadal or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, you can’t help thinking about the contrasts of grace that achieve the same athletic needs; Nadal the pouncing...

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Joanna MacGregor, Wigmore Hall/ Sol Picó, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Joanna MacGregor: She turned Bach and Shostakovich into something like electronic piano music

The two-course evening out is made possible by the Wigmore Hall’s late Friday-night concerts, so if you get out of a central-London show - or dinner - by, say, 9.30, you can add a second layer of entertainment at 10. In my case, a ferociously poor...

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Dave St-Pierre Company, Un Peu de Tendresse, Sadler's Wells

When asked if I wanted to go and see two dozen naked Canadians doing audience participation, the answer was, self-evidently, nonononononononono. And then, for good measure, NO. Well, I’m here to tell you, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I...

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Rambert, Cardoon Club/ Roses/ Monolith, Sadler’s Wells

Another of Paul Taylor's masterpieces: 'Roses', in rehearsal

Paul Taylor's Roses is called Roses because, well, because it is. There are no roses here, no flowery sentiment, no overwrought angst and emotion. This, one of Taylor’s most beautifully serene works, is the smell of roses on a still May evening:...

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Cleopatra, Northern Ballet, Sadler's Wells

David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly...

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Dutch National Ballet, Hans Van Manen, Sadler's Wells

From fission to fusion: Hans Van Manen's deft, intricate 'Concertante'

In a world crying out for even below-mediocre ballet choreographers (Benjamin Millepied, anyone?), the Dutch old master Hans Van Manen is an extraordinarily well-kept secret. Why a man of such superb balletic accomplishment, theatrical instincts...

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Pénombre, Rosalba Torres Guerrero & Lucas Racasse, Sadler's Wells

Pénombre, penumbra: "The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, when the light source is larger than a point source and only part of its light is cut off (contrasted with the full shadow or umbra)." Pénombre, penumbra: "An area...

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Final curtain for Sadler's Wells

Sadler's Wells 1981-2011: Dancing to victory was in his blood

Sad news for arts lovers with an eye on the horses - Sadler’s Wells, dubbed the greatest-ever sire of racehorses, died this week aged 30. His parents were the champion sire Northern Dancer and Fairy Bridge, and the arts supplied the names for racing...

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Rosas, Bartók/ Mikrokosmos, Sadler's Wells

Sometimes, watching contemporary dance, you feel that no choreographer has ever known a happy moment – such angst, such grief, such terrible agony rolls over the footlights out to the audience that arriving at the theatre feeling mildly content can...

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Rosas, Fase, Sadler’s Wells

'Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich'

How do simple things get complicated? How do they stay simple once they are complicated? These might, perhaps, be the questions from which choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, starts. But in fact, she starts, as all great choreographers do,...

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Daniel Linehan, Sadler's Wells, Lilian Baylis Theatre

Photography is linked closely with memory. Photographs help us recall family, friends, holidays, and it can attest to an event. But one could argue that it actually serves a purpose of forgetting. As we are immersed in a digital age, the photograph...

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