Dance
Ismene Brown
I was trying to remember the last time a choreographer actually tried to make the audience smile in the past few months. Dance-lovers are suckers for guilt. They creep into the dark of their seat to be regaled by their share of the blame for the world’s wrongs, and creep home chastened, if not fully corrected (Rosas, Kylián, Schaufuss). Or else they are beaten about the head with the choreographer’s own personal shtick (Bausch, MacMillan, Petit). I know which I prefer.No venue is more a secular church for expiation than Sadler’s Wells, London's dance theatre. Last week it hosted two of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over the decades, some home-reared, others drawn from abroad like moths to flames by the chance to dance ballets where no archetypes can be found, only real people in situations of such prescribed individuality that the performers themselves can become their most individual.There isn’t a more demanding role than Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, a ballet Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own? Maybe that’s it. Opera is about living in the threat of death (all those tubercular arias and declarations from the heart of bonfires). Theatre is all about living, imperfectly. But in ballet, life itself is only a holding position - it exists in a realm that looks forward, erotically and existentially, to death, it forecasts the run-up to death Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The combination of Romeo, Juliet and the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky should be almost too much for the blood pressure. Those defiant lovers, that emotive yet intellectual young Russian craftsman of ballet. Hence the huge turn-out of balletomanes for National Ballet of Canada at Sadler’s Wells last night.Hence the disappointment. Any fool could tell you the keywords of Romeo and Juliet: passion, youth, rule-breaking, sex, risk, panache forever. Any fool should have told Ratmansky, whose ballet created in 2011 for the Canadians' 60th anniversary seems to have missed them altogether, being Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Rite is dark, both visually and in emotion, and stems from the same concept as Nijinsky’s - pack mentality and what fate this can project onto the "chosen one". But Dolan’s look is visually different. The 10 dancers are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yok is a fine Turkish word meaning “there isn’t any”. You use it for “no”, as in, say - is Midnight Express any good? Yok.The hot news surrounding this production was all in the scarpering of its two stars a week before opening, both exceptional Russian artists with stellar reputations to lose. While Britain was agog at the latest fleeing from responsibilities of the wayward tyro Sergei Polunin - slated to play Billy Hayes - probably the more indicative evacuee was the senior Igor Zelensky, Polunin’s mentor and boss at the Stanislavsky Ballet, but better remembered over here as a king of Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two acts first created for the Weimar Arts Festival in 1999. Duato used Bach’s canon throughout, focusing on concertos and orchestral suites in the first part (14 pieces), and compositions for organ with further excerpts from The Art of Fugue in the second (seven pieces). The execution of the music by the Mikhailovsky orchestra under their musical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new ballet on Benjamin Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas headlines Birmingham Royal Ballet's announcement of its 2013-14 season. David Bintley is tackling a tricky score that Britten wrote originally for John Cranko in 1957, and later taken up by Kenneth MacMillan in his 1989 ballet staging for the Royal Ballet. Designed by War Horse designer Rae Smith, the ballet will premiere next February at the Birmingham Hippodrome.Originally created for National Ballet of Japan in 2011, it tells of a princess who resists her wicked stepmother's attempts to marry her off and instead follows a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Russian superstar ballerina Natalia Osipova is to join the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House announced today. The 26-year-old Moscow ballerina, who made her name as a wunderkind in the Bolshoi Ballet until she quit two years ago, signed a contract last month but held back the news until the end of the London tour of her current company, the Mikhailovsky Ballet, reports Russian daily Kommersant.Osipova danced as a guest with the Royal Ballet last autumn in Swan Lake with Carlos Acosta (pictured right, © Alice Pennefather/ROH), and her dramatic range has made her an obvious target Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jane Austen would approve, I think, of the plot of La Bayadère, which is about class and wealth getting in the way of love. She might have difficulty with the setting. It is a grand, exotically located ballet offering us an fantastical India of Rajahs, tiger-hunts and sex-slaves - or rather temple-dancers, whose job is to carry holy water to the needy and put up with the unwanted lust of the High Brahmin. There is jealousy, murder, drug-taking and mayhem as the temple collapses, and final union beyond this world for the leading couple. And all of that comes with the single most heavenly scene Read more ...
Ismene Brown
General booking for the Bolshoi Ballet's Covent Garden season this summer opens on Tuesday (9 April), and the company has at last announced its intended casting. However, it should always be borne in mind that, as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo habitually announce before every performance, "in accordance with strict Russian tradition, there may be changes". The notable news is the absence of two male names from the roster - Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who is currently taking the Bolshoi Theatre to court over disciplinary action in the wake of the acid attack on Bolshoi director Sergei Filin, Read more ...
judith.flanders
It’s not often you go to a ballet to watch a history lesson unfold, but Laurencia, the 1939 Soviet ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, gives us exactly that, and a gripping one under the froth and fun.Based on the 17th-century playwright Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, Laurencia tells of the wicked ruler Don Fernán, who spots the lovely Laurencia (Natalia Osipova) as she is dancing with her fiancé, Frondoso (Ivan Vasiliev). Frondoso protects her at some risk to himself, and instead Don Fernán and his men assault their friend Jacinta (the lovely Oksana Bondareva).In Act II, the Don Read more ...