Dance
Hanna Weibye
“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage. Under her leadership, ENB’s company atmosphere and public image now vibrate with passion, frankness, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sure as carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the 2010s are following a standard 20-year nostalgia cycle by embracing the 1990s as their "retro twin" decade. The quiet rumblings of the last few years – student Nineties parties and the reappearance of the crop top – have this year flowered into a full-on revival that has hairdressers fingering their razors (remember the Rachel cut?), thirty-somethings wearing double denim again, and Rambert coming to Sadler’s Wells with revivals from 1990-1 alongside a Merce Cunningham classic from the Nineties’ own retro twin decade, the 1970s.Four Read more ...
bella.todd
Getting pubes in your teeth during sex is one thing. Rabbit fur is something else. The moment when Ben Duke removes a wisp of partner Ino Riga’s costume from his mouth following a particularly lusty tussle may not be planned. But it’s in keeping with this witty dance-theatre duet created by Olivier-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Lost Dog. Like Rabbits is all about the wild joy of a new relationship, the secret worlds we can access through sexual abandon, and the pressure that passion, and love, come under when reality intrudes.Their starting point is the Virginia Woolf short story Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Some artists acquire (or create) cults of personality because – Byron, Wagner or Van Gogh – they are just so obviously fruity. Some others, though less fruity, are venerated because their work is so tear-prickingly astonishing that we are desperate to get closer to its source. Shakespeare is one such; George Balanchine, the twentieth-century Russian-American choreographer, is another. Serenade (1934), the first piece he made in America, is a thing of wonder. Ever argued with a music-lover who thought most scores would be better without dance’s cheap, distracting visuals? Show ‘em this, Read more ...
Sarah Wilkinson
Watching The Royal Ballet’s The Winter’s Tale a few weeks ago, I was struck by the quasi-absurdity of adapting the Bard for dance - a thought numerous choreographers must have encountered while toying with the idea. The complexity of Shakespeare’s plots and characters, and the importance of his linguistic intricacy has meant that relatively few have dared to take on the task and even fewer have succeeded in creating lasting adaptations. Winter’s Tale premiered to predominantly glowing reviews and Ashton’s one-act The Dream will be revisited at the end of the month with The Royal Ballet, but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the mottos made famous by internationally renowned chocolatier Willy Wonka was: “A little madness now and then is relished by the wisest men”. Perhaps it’s a quotation that Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, who put Talk to the Demon together, has framed on his wall. The piece is truly a trip, weaving down a barely trodden path between theatre, dance and art, ignoring narrative in favour of a free-flowing conceptual odyssey, rocketing the audience through exhilaration to tedium and back again. It doesn’t always work and it’s too long but I left the venue with my brain Read more ...
Hofesh Shechter
On a lovely sunny Saturday morning the Children’s Parade was a really amazing start to things. The Brighton Festival team, the mayor and I started the parade, leading from the front for a few streets, then we went and watched from the side, wonderful, it made the hairs on my neck stand up. That evening was the first performance of my show Sun which opened the Festival and we had a big party afterwards. Not only that but it was my 39th birthday so it was a triple celebration. I didn’t feel rough on Sunday, though. I had a good amount of champagne but I’m still young - not 40 yet.On Sunday we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián. But Aakash Odedra, who presented two new pieces, Murmur and Inked, in the Patrick Centre inside the Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, has had more dealings than most with superstar dancers and choreographers: his mentor Akram Khan is both (and incidentally a collaborator of Guillem’s). Russell Maliphant and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui have also created pieces Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When Sylvie Guillem became, at 19, the youngest person ever to reach the top rank of the Paris Opéra, she gained a job title – étoile (star) – that uncannily captured her essence. Most companies call their top dancers principal or prima ballerina or soloist, titles that show they have first place among their peers. Sylvie too stands out among her peers, blessed as she is with an extraordinary body, an extraordinary work ethic, an extraordinary intelligence. But the reason choreographers call her, dancers revere her, critics eulogise her, and audiences with tears in their eyes clap their hands Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wim Vandekeybus (b. 1963) is the man behind Ultima Vez, a theatrical-choreographic powerhouse in Brussels. With his guidance they have sped to the forefront of European multi-media performance with such works as Monkey Sandwich, Oedipus/Bêt Noir, NieuwZwart and Booty Looting, each combining music, dance, visual arts and theatre in different ratios to startling effect.After leaving school Vandekeybus took psychology at Leuven University but, finding the discipline’s scientific rationality restrictive and wanting to apply it to more artistic areas, he left and worked with the designer- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If, standing on a station platform, your arms want to make shapes in the air; if, walking home, you are mesmerised by the curved toes of your shoes against the pavement; if, in the kitchen, a stray salad leaf on the floor transforms before your eyes into a tiny green lizard, head up, questioning – then (if you are over the age of 10 and reasonably level-headed) you have probably consumed some mind-altering substance.In my case, last Saturday night, it was (honest, m’lud!) nothing more dangerous than a cocktail of contemporary dance + Shakespeare, served up cool and cloudy by Canadian Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On the back wall of Birmingham Symphony Hall’s great oval space, two musicians are poised on a glass balcony that gives the illusion of not being there at all. A small square of warm light picks them out, vivid against the hall’s darkness. So framed, Saint-Saëns’ gentle Prière for cello and organ keeps its intimacy even in that large space, the two instruments blending into one equal sound that is clear, golden, and not too sweet.The dancing promised us by the concert’s title was nowhere in evidence, but this opening nonetheless set the tone for the rest of the evening, which was Read more ...