Dance
Matthew Paluch
What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and choreography, Vaslav Nijinsky, at one of the Russian Ballet Icons galas that annually pack in an audience mostly made up of the Russian community London has now come to call its own.Nijinsky (to me, as a male dancer in my thirties) is responsible for a number of things: first, changing what it meant to be a male dancer; second, defining a new way of moving; Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fifteen years ago two male ballet dancers took the awesome risk of leaving the Royal Ballet with an idea in their head about independence. Their first venture was a new Japanese ballet company, which quickly lost their interest as it hit a conventional showbizzy trail. Then they took their second perilous risk: Michael Nunn and William Trevitt boldly declared that they intended to make a point about the possibilities of male dancing in today’s Britain. Enter the Ballet Boyz.They’ve weathered some exceptionally adverse conditions, running several professional lives in parallel, making TV films Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So the man who specialises in dancing Bolshoi ballet villains has been arrested and confessed to the infamous attack on his boss, Sergei Filin. But today Pavel Dmitrichenko, well-known to Bolshoi audiences for playing Ivan the Terrible, one of Russia's more pitiless Tsars, showed an equally Tsarist haughtiness when he made his first appearance in a Moscow court. He had nothing to apologise for, he said, even though it's emerging that at the very least Filin, a 42-year-old father of three, will never see normally again and his future employment must be in doubt.Dmitrichenko insisted it wasn't Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
Ballet Black open their eighth Linbury Studio Theatre season with a quadruple bill of new works which looks promising on paper but less so in actuality. The evening begins with Robert Binet’s EGAL, the title being a (now obsolete) Middle English word meaning equal, which Binet used as the piece’s crux. The work is a duet that’s meant to ‘"xplore the possibilities and complications that might arise if two people who are completely equal in every sense and ability were to encounter each other". Even though the blurb is rather loose, the piece still doesn’t manage to communicate much, if any of Read more ...
judith.flanders
If you are a Bausch newbie, Vollmond (Full Moon) may well be the place to start. “It’s a full moon,” says Nazareth Panadero, giving us a cynical smirk. “Don’t get drunk,” she adds before sauntering off. Glasses are raised and, as always in Bausch, water flows, both in and, especially, out of glasses, across the stage, swept in buckets-full over the massive rock that looms at the edge of a great pool of water lurking invisibly at the rear.Vollmond was choreographed in 2006, just three years before Bausch’s terribly sudden death. In it she continued to explore her regular preoccupations – the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two world premieres in one night is almost more pressure than anyone can bear - choreographers, commissioning company or audience. Still more when the spotlit dancemakers are probably the two top Western names in the art, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon. Everyone, but everyone, expects masterpieces.The curse of Apollo strikes, however. That is Balanchine’s Apollo, still as shockingly new and explicitly thrilling today as it was 85 years ago, and - as an opener on the triple bill - putting down a marker against which the premieres have to compete. A blessing on last night’s opening Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in pieces around them. On Thursday, for the last time, Marguerite and Armand will be danced as a farewell to the Royal Ballet by its departed favourites, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, whose interpretations of the dying courtesan and her tragically hotheaded young lover have shown the heights that ballet can reach in deceiving spectators with purple romance.The ballet was created by Sir Frederick Read more ...
judith.flanders
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.Monotones II, the second or “white” half, was created first, a gala piece which defies the usual fate of gala pieces. The starkness, the heroic simplicity and grace of this trio was immediately apparent, and Ashton Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bristling chest, the suggestive swell under the feathered crotch, the leering lipsticked mouth, the size 12 pink pointe shoes. Even the name of the troupe tickles the ribs, so serious yet so ridiculous. What's a camp word like Trockadero doing in the middle of a legendary Russian ballet company name?It's time to raise a scented handkerchief in respect to the male comics known as the Trocks, visiting Britain on their 40th anniversary tour. The beefy ballerinas with their fragile Russian nerves have been dying on stage before us for decades and show no sign of stopping, so much do audiences Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.I try to think what good dance feels like to watch - and I say, “feels Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
If by the end of a show you’ve both wowed and ouched out loud, I would declare it’s safe to say you’re getting your money's-worth. Tango Fire's new show at the Peacock Theatre, Flames of Desire, does all the above and more. In fact it could be described as the West End equivalent to a supermarket deal the average savvy consumer simply can’t resist – three for the price of one: exquisite dancers, a charismatic chanteur, and an electrifying band.The dancers are 10 of Argentina’s best, headed by the dancer/in-house choreographer German Cornejo. The singer, Jesus Hidalgo, has the charm and Read more ...