Dance
judith.flanders
As everyone who has been watching Agony & Ecstasy: A Year with the English National Ballet on BBC Four now knows, Vadim Muntagirov, last night’s Prince Siegfried, and Daria Klimentová, his Odette/Odile, are the ultimate in ballet melodrama: one is a young dancer on the rise, the other reaching the end of a notable career. And both came together to produce a memorable Swan Lake in Derek Deane’s tasteful proscenium production.One needs to stress the proscenium part, as his 1997 in-the-round production for the Royal Albert Hall, complete with six dozen swans but no sets, has become Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. It was the two musicians who thought up the idea of turning Hans Christian Andersen’s very beautiful and poignant 1897 fairytale into a ballet, a story in which the deliberate destruction of an astonishing, ingenious clock is not the end of the story, but becomes a celebration of creativity Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Born in Venezuela 48 years ago, de Frutos has never been the fairytale type, at least not overtly. His 20-year career of choreography has been a career of unstoppable fecundity, violent flamboyance, extreme, even grotesque exhibition, outrageous passion. To many he’s a shock jock of contemporary dance. To me he’s one of the two choreographers in Britain to whom I most look forward, pinned uneasily to the edge of my seat, waiting to be discomforted, disconcerted, left in turmoil and not sure what I believe any more.I thought Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez a grotesquely funny satire Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet’s sizeable Japanese contingent of dancers, headed by former principal ballerina Miyako Yoshida, are staging a concert performance of ballet at 4pm today in aid of the Japanese Tsunami Appeal. All tickets are £20, to pay in cash on the door at arrival at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House. Yoshida, former Principal, hopes to be joined on stage by Yuhui Choe, Valeri Hristov, Hikaru Kobayashi, Ryoichi Hirano, Kenta Kura, Akane Takada and students from the Royal Academy of Music for the hour-long show.
natalie.wheen
Kenneth MacMillan’s dramatic ballet Manon was premiered in 1974 to a chorus of attacks on its tale of a “nasty little diamond-digger”, as one critic had it. Since then the slut who can’t help herself has risen to become one of the most coveted roles in the world for major classical ballerinas (as another critic at the time foresaw), and the ballet is now in the repertoire of some 18 companies around the world.But one problem has remained constantly noticed - a sense that its orchestral score, a medley of Massenet arranged by Leighton Lucas, could do better justice to the story. Last weekend a Read more ...
judith.flanders
For those in the know, Sergei Polunin has been marked out as “the one to watch” from his schooldays. Since he won the Prix de Lausanne in 2006 and joined the Royal Ballet the following year, he has been “the next big thing”. Well, I’m here to tell you, after last night’s performance of Rhapsody, he is not the next big thing. He is the big thing now.He gave the performance of a lifetime, and, even more astonishingly, looked so comfortable that it is perfectly clear that, at only 21, he has a dance-lifetime of such performances well within his grasp.I know, I know, I sound like a teenager in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At the 11th hour (as we all know from the current telly series), English National Ballet has pulled a gorgeous plum out of its back catalogue that throws open vistas of what a ballet company should be: Serge Lifar’s sumptuous Suite en Blanc. Why this beauty, laced with the hot Spanish deliciousness of Eduard Lalo’s 1881 music, hasn’t been done for 35 years can presumably be put down to its sheer difficulty, because this is a ballet that bathes the eyes in lipsmackingly tricky, astronomically stylish choreography - stylish as only French classical ballet can be.It’s dressed in white and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi Ballet's company manager, Gennady Yanin, has resigned after pornographic pictures appeared on the internet that were linked to him, just as he was being considered to take on the job of artistic director, which became vacant that day. As a result the world's largest ballet company is now leaderless, with an inexperienced dancer appointed to hold the fort. SEE LATEST NEWS: Sergei Filin appointed artistic director for five yearsThe scandal has left Moscow’s vast company reeling, with a prestigious Paris tour looming in May, and the reopening in October after long and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes, this is incredible. Not just the sounds, nor the ambitious staging of Hans Christian Andersen's last story as a ballet, but the fact that, 30 years since they met, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are still making music that's both relevant and gloriously excessive to a frankly crackerdog mental degree. They've tinkered with classical themes before, of course, from setting “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” in 1988's “Left to My Own Devices” to their 2004 live soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin, but this is something else. Piling on romantic themes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. One tells his ballerina she’ll need to masturbate to discover her inner black swan; the other one contemptuously dismisses his ballerina as too old, too knackered, past hope. Then compare the ballerina characters: Portman miserable, wrung out, almost incapable, mentally unstable; ENB’s Daria Klimentová smiling again and again, as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Northern Ballet’s genes are rooted in the Royal Ballet’s narrative golden age of the Sixties, its most significant leader Christopher Gable having been the originally intended Romeo of Kenneth MacMillan’s iconic 1965 Romeo and Juliet. While the London companies at Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells and ENB, struggled to make new ballet dramas after MacMillan, Gable loudly and continually insisted that the heart of British storytelling now lay in his popular creations for Northern Ballet Theatre in Yorkshire, and it’s a ballet-lite tradition this company has stuck to for decades through his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To achieve a black stage that emits or reflects no light is a hell of an achievement. To place a huge black horse with black rider onto that stage, without the slightest noise, and to contrive a black shadow on the black, is to create an image found in the fathomless wells of subconscious imagery, and the skill of that vision and realisation of it is something I doubt I'm going to forget.The Centaur and the Animal is a very strange and potent piece of theatre at Sadler’s Wells this week uniting - if it were possible - the pessimism of Japanese butoh dance-theatre with the mystical grandeur of Read more ...