Dance
Peter Culshaw
4 am. Eternal. I'm at an all-night temple festival somewhere in north Kerala in southern India - not so much in the middle of nowhere as on the outskirts of nowhere. There's wild chenda drumming and a terrifying apparition of a man who has gone into a trance – the goddess Babrakali, they tell me, has possessed him. He's wearing an outrageous red costume 12ft high, and he is charging right at me. The fact that his outfit is on fire, that he's just bitten the head off a live cockerel and the remains of the unlucky fowl dangle from his mouth, doesn't reassure me.In fact, he stops just in front Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A modern choreographer has arrived when he gets to run two companies in parallel, the institution that appoints him director, and - as a sort of personal couture line - his own group. Wayne McGregor does it with the Royal Ballet and his Random Dance, now it’s Rafael Bonachela who took on Sydney Dance Company at the end of last year, while retaining his own Bonachela Dance Company at the South Bank Centre. Going by last night, I don't think living a bi-hemispheric existence is aiding his powers to entertain.Bonachela's talent is slim - nice, but slim. A decade ago it was interesting to see him Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two ballets are premiered this month with big scientific subjects and new commissioned scores. Birmingham Royal Ballet's David Bintley was inspired by Einstein's principle of relativity, with a Matthew Hindson score, while Mark Baldwin at Rambert Dance Company has been excited by Darwin, with a Julian Anderson score. How does science meet dance? Einstein+Birmingham Royal Ballet: e=mc2 by David Bintley ISMENE BROWN: How do you think science connects with dance?DAVID BINTLEY: Really I was looking for a subject to work on with the particular composer, Matthew Hindson. I came across Read more ...
theartsdesk
Johan Persson took photographs of Kim Brandstrup's new ballet with Tamara Rojo, Goldberg, which was premiered at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, on 21 September 2009. Music is J S Bach's Goldberg Variations, designs Richard Hudson, lighting Paule Constable, video Leo Warner for Fifty Nine Productions Ltd, sound Ian Dearden. Performed by Tamara Rojo, Tom Whitehead, Steven McRae, Clara Barbera, Laura Caldow, Tommy Franzén, Riccardo Meneghini. Pianists Philip Gammon and Henry Roche. Read Ismene Brown's review.Click on a picture to enter full view and slideshow. [bg|/johanpersson/ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At last a seriously good new ballet created not just inside the Royal Opera House’s bunker-like Linbury Studio Theatre but actually making complete sense of its space and atmosphere. Kim Brandstrup’s new creation with the Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo, Goldberg, is a beautiful, grown-up piece of fine musical feeling and drama, and with a design and lighting scheme to die for.They came from left-field on this one, since to get anything made new at the Royal Ballet is generally a torturous business of compromise with time, cast and concept. But Rojo swung her weight about as ballerina and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Britain’s Got Talent this year Diversity and Flawless raised the bar for street dance as far as mass British audiences were concerned, a public increasingly schooled by Sadler’s Wells’ smart and eclectic annual spring hip-hop festival. So Bounce, the Swedish crew returning to London with its 2006 version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has new standards to compete with.The title, Insane in the Brain, is the clue to the general outlook of the performance, which translates a would-be tragic melodrama into undemanding light entertainment with mild street dance and a big Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet's leading ballerina Tamara Rojo was holding a large and not old but already battered diary when we met, pages and dried flowers falling out of it, along with notes and photographs. It’s barely a book, more a pile of loose papers, but it is the 10-year diary with which this extraordinary performer, still only 35, intends to see out her dancing career, and move on to her next.She will spend next week nightly on stage at the Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in a new ballet created for her at the Royal Ballet by Kim Brandstrup, set to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It will Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was he the prodigal son who abandoned Russia? Or the figure who did more than anyone to integrate Russian and European culture in the first half of the last century? As two major exhibitions open on the heritage of Sergei Diaghilev, celebrated impresario and “20th-century Medici”, for the first time Russians will have the chance to decide for themselves.It is the centenary of the first performances by the Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as the 80th anniversary of the death of the company’s no less legendary founder, and exhibitions marking his extraordinary creative achievements have been on Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Having felt thoroughly racked by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s marathonian and bone-dry Rosas danst Rosas on Wednesday, I was hardly expecting charm and beguilement from the even longer Zeitung last night. But Zeitung is one of the most delightful and intelligent evenings about modern dance’s volatile relationship with classical music that I’ve seen.Twenty-five years separate the two and an aeon of difference in emotional generosity; Rosas danst Rosas looks like the piano scales and exercises before the sophisticated, expressive performance for nine dancers and pianist that is Zeitung (German Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come from 1997, before Artangel’s staging at London’s Roundhouse of what became instantly known as the white bouncy castle, Tight Roaring Circle, 2001 before the showing of two full-length ballet productions, Artifact and Eidos:Telos by his Ballett Frankfurt, then his company, and 2003, on the closing down by conservative civic authorities of Ballett Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The phenomenal French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (b. 1965) has always been a modern woman, for all her classical ballerina dress. She joined the Royal Ballet in 1989 from Nureyev's Paris Opera Ballet, on terms of strictest independence, hardly saying a word to the press, while her image as a brilliant but truculent "Mademoiselle Non" grew and grew. The image belies the person, though - once you meet her, what’s striking is her lack of side, unblinkered intelligence and polite but firm candour.This first of four interviews dates from December 1995 when the world’s most imitated classical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Carlos Acosta danced Spartacus with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 2007, the man, the time and the place united the strands of a most extraordinary story in ballet, a story of peregrination, of dreadful reverses, of the pursuit of civilisation, of holding on to the best of human values in despairing times.This might, yes, describe Acosta’s own story (captivatingly told in his new memoir No Way Home, HarperPress) - but there is a more epic tale at issue here. It is the story of a dynasty of very great teachers and performers, the Messerers of Moscow.From Russia to Cuba, from London to Read more ...