Sadler's Wells
Tanguera, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 10 August 2010
Strange listening to Sadler’s Wells chief Alistair Spalding timidly defending “cutting-edge” dance on yesterday’s Radio 4 arts debate - having just been to the current SWT dance show, Tanguera. Supposedly giving a smash-hit new international spin on... Read more... |
Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother, Sadler's WellsThursday, 15 July 2010
In the middle of the pulverisingly loud and utterly thrilling experience that is Hofesh Shechter’s new production Political Mother, I wished suddenly that all dancers could come and see this piece, see what clarion theatre dance can be. If the... Read more... |
David Michalek: Slow Dancing, Trafalgar Square/ Nederlands Dans Theater, Sadler’s WellsTuesday, 06 July 2010
One of the most difficult questions to answer is what makes a great performer great? So much that happens on stage takes place in an eye-blink. Dancer A is "better" than Dancer B, but why? Critics talk about "line", about "extension", about how... Read more... |
Zaide, Sadler's WellsSunday, 27 June 2010
The story starts promisingly with a love story between a prisoner Gomatz and Zaide, the favourite concubine of the tyrant Soliman. The two lovers escape with the help of Allazim. They are re-captured. Then Mozart gave up. His sources for the story,... Read more... |
Kabuki, Sadler's WellsFriday, 04 June 2010
It is hard to think of anything more "foreign" than kabuki to the Anglo style of acting, a style which reveres naturalism and makes "reality" its ultimate aim. Yet kabuki is gaining a knowledgeable – and welcoming – audience in London. The Shochiku... Read more... |
The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 25 May 2010
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her... Read more... |
BABEL (words), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 18 May 2010
Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a regular at Rosebery Avenue with his mixed-theatre works FOI... Read more... |
Gnosis, Akram Khan, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 27 April 2010
Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, or recognition. Surely Akram Khan has some unusual intuition about what it means to die, since his latest creation is truly a dance of death and the gods certainly seem to have been bent on preventing it.It was... Read more... |
Pictures from an Exhibition, Sadler's WellsSunday, 25 April 2010
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s... Read more... |
Prima Donna, Sadler's WellsMonday, 12 April 2010
Why write gluey pastiche Massenet and Puccini when you could compose as your flamboyant self? Why collaborate on a cliché-ridden French text when your song lyrics declare themselves so piquantly in English? Rufus Wainwright must have his own reasons... Read more... |
Rufus Wainwright: Pop Star and Opera StarMonday, 29 March 2010
To be born into the extraordinary Wainwright dynasty is to be born onstage, and Rufus has seized his birthright in a giant bear-hug. Mere weeks after the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle, from cancer in January, the lanky, somewhat Heathcliff-... Read more... |
Blaze: the Streetdance Sensation, Peacock TheatreTuesday, 16 March 2010
With a title like that, and a slug across the posters that so boastingly prejudges last night's premiere, some of us might keep our sceptical specs on when we turn up at the spirits-lowering Peacock Theatre to see this latest leap by mainstream... Read more... |
