Dance
javier.defrutos
There is a moment when you see dancers at their absolute peak that notches a bit of history in your memory - you never forget when you see it happen. In my area of contemporary choreography you can’t measure it in those terms but you can with classical ballet, and a Don Quixote performance like I saw at the Bolshoi last night sets the bar. This level of performance is Olympic-sized, it erases everything else you have seen.Of course it’s the pair of them that this ballet is about, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, the two of them uniting their fabulous youth and abilities in a click with Read more ...
Ismene Brown
After all the encomia for Natalia Osipova it’s time for a paean to another Bolshoi ballerina, whose witty underplaying and conquest of style makes her the lady I’d choose to see shipwrecked in full tutu, diamonds and pink satin pointe shoes on any desert island I fetched up on. Maria Alexandrova starred in two 19th-century restorations of palatial opulence - the pirate party Le Corsaire and the princess party Paquita. Mistress of balletic patisserie, she decorates these glorious old wedding cakes of choreography with delectable sugar rosettes in her footwork, leaps of lightest meringue, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great stars get lost sometimes. Up there in outer space, ringed with adulation, when they get a mid-life crisis sometimes they get sucked into a vanity black hole. No light emits, just the tatters of an angel who lost his way in his own legend.Carlos Acosta is one miracle dancer whose unique gift for the past 15 years has been to free us from our sense of cloddishness. He was sent from heaven like Mercury, with winged feet, to elevate us all by his divinely sprung dancing. He is sweet and funny as Colas, easily led by the nose by a sly girl. He’s the greatest Spartacus I’ve ever seen, a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When the words "commercial" and "art" come together - as they do with the Bolshoi season currently at the Royal Opera House - odds are the glue between them is a three-word phrase "Victor Hochhauser presents". Victor and Lilian Hochhauser are the impresarios behind most Russian ballet seasons UK-wide, and they have a reputation for solid box-office commercial taste, which is easily dismissed as the safe option. But they are in their eighties now, and conservatism is forgivable. In younger, bolder, Cold War days, these cultural buccaneers brought Britain Richter, Oistrakh, Rostropovich, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Confirmation today of the astonishing news from Russia - Nacho Duato will indeed become the new director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St Petersburg’s second company, from the New Year. The Spanish contemporary choreographer will be the first foreigner to lead a Russian ballet company for more than a century.The Mikhailovsky General Director, fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, said at today's press conference in St Petersburg: "Engaging an internationally known choreographer in the prime of his strength and talents is incredibly significant not only for the Mikhailovsky Theatre, but for Russian Read more ...
theartsdesk
Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.DMITRI GRUZDYEV: "Looking at the pictures I see some familiar things from my training - the open shoulders, standing tall, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’re getting used to expecting the extraordinary from Natalia Osipova - and then getting some more. With her impish face and farouche capriciousness, with a spring like a high-jumper and shoulders like a swimmer, she is without doubt the most explosively delightful comedienne and virtuoso around at the Bolshoi, but could she be a Giselle? A weak-hearted innocent, a sorrowing ghost, an angel of pleading mercy? Doubt it not. Last night Osipova proved her versatility breathtakingly, weaving the supernatural magic of Giselle in a wholly individual way, defying her own image, and she was Read more ...
natalie.wheen
How often has one sat at a first night at the opera or ballet, groaning at missed cues, horrors with costumes, disasters with lighting: one thinks they should surely have got it right by this time? And the rest of the evening is somehow diminished by this upset. But then, how much do we in the audience understand about what it takes to put on a performance, where there are so many elements to co-ordinate and where, therefore, so much conspires to go wrong? And what if indeed it is human ineptitude that conspires? And pure, incomprehensible perverseness?When Deborah MacMillan – Kenneth Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Coppélia is the name of the doll in the ballet-comedy - not that of the heroine, who is a bad pixie named Swanilda, a girl of youthful capriciousness but a heart of gold. What you hope for when you go to see this usually rather quaint 19th-century ballet is a ballerina of such intoxicating personality that she can serve you a ridiculous plot and make you lap it up. It’s what makes Natalia Osipova one of the most life-enhancing substances on earth today, and last night’s opening of the Bolshoi's Coppélia was a Champagne night.This cute little black-haired Muscovite is pure Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Russia was plunged into Revolution in 1917, a chief balletmaster inside the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg feared the worst. It was not simply the death of Tsars he feared, but the death of all culture associated with them, including the classical ballet that had grown to become an opulent wonder of the world. For 25 years all the ballets in the repertoire had been notated, their choreography, how the steps fitted the music, what costumes and sets should be. The notes were filed in several large volumes. The balletmaster made a snap decision - he took them furtively out of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rape, marauding soldiers, peasants on the warpath and a flash hero - are we at the Bolshoi’s Spartacus once again? No, we’re at the Mikhailovsky Ballet down the road at the Coliseum where a rather more Erroll Flynn-type spectacle is being offered, Laurencia. This is a Soviet warhorse predating Grigorovich’s Spartacus by two decades, and with a much more 19th-century costume ballet feel to it, more of an alternative Don Quixote, with a bravura pair of leading roles and lashings of Spaniards and castanets.It’s set in Spain, based on Lope da Vega’s 17th-century peasant revenge tragedy Fuente Read more ...
David Nice
Roll up, roll up for the ancient Roman circus of a production almost as old as I am. Thrill to the catchy tunes and the oom-pah basses of flash Aram Khachaturian, played with the kind of lurid splendour you thought could only be faked on Soviet-era Melodiya recordings. Enjoy the pageant of sword-waggling, goosestepping cohorts, flagellated slaves, skimpy-tunicked maidens and golden-wigged ephebes. Admire muscled flesh, less flagrant than in the outrageously homoerotic telly production Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but top quality all the same. And laugh out loud, as I did, not from a Read more ...