Dance Features

theartsdesk in Perm: To Russia With Romeo

Natalie Wheen Sunday, 09 June 2013

If you look at a map of Russia, you will find the city of Perm just west of the spine of the Ural Mountains which divides European Russia from Asia, about 720 miles north-east of Moscow. Just under...

Still Shocking - The Rite of Spring 100 Years On

Ismene Brown Monday, 01 April 2013

Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the...

Sylvie Guillem on resurrecting Marguerite & Armand

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 19 February 2013

There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in...

Dance: The Best of 2012

Ismene Brown Saturday, 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...

Black-Out Ballet: The Invisible Woman of British Ballet

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 11 December 2012

In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that...

Royal Opera House chief Tony Hall to the BBC - now what?

Ismene Brown Thursday, 22 November 2012

So Tony Hall moves from heading the Royal Opera House to taking over the BBC as its new Director-General. I can't for a moment imagine a rerun of that crucial mini-conversation between Helen Boaden...

Kenneth MacMillan Died 20 Years Ago

Ismene Brown Friday, 16 November 2012

It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely...

The Composer and the Water-Nymph: Hans Werner Henze's Ondine

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 31 October 2012

Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man...

theartsdesk Olympics: The Golden Age

Ismene Brown Thursday, 19 July 2012

Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and...

The Gods of Grace: When Sport is Beautiful

Ismene Brown Thursday, 12 July 2012

Faster, higher, stronger - and more graceful. There is a handful of top athletes and sportspeople who are the beautiful people, who have some divine extra dimension to their movement that makes you...