Dance
Ismene Brown
Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular door-slamming by a young ballet dancer who bolstered the myth that we would all be happier if we quit an arcanely dedicated, quietly hardworking world where we were notably appreciated by the team, in order to take quick riches, dubious star vehicles and avid media spotlights. Sergei Polunin's complicated departure from the Royal Ballet was one of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?With that morose stare, he's a terrible advert for arts-loving for a start, leaving a chill as he wanders among the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Once upon a time... for a child there is always an attic, with a rocking-horse, a wardrobe, an old clock and granny’s huge chair. And there's always a story to be found there about being monstrously bad and naughty, and being forgiven. This is the delight of the irresistible staging of The Wind in the Willows at the Royal Opera House’s subterranean Linbury Studio Theatre.Out of the cupboard drawer you can drag a stripey river, from the wonky rafters you can pull down green willow fronds, and inside a rolled-up old carpet there sleeps a myopic, shy Mole. Now 10 years old, the production with Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The seasonal Nuts-fest continues (and culminates) with another two to add to the roast – live: English National Ballet’s recent production, and digital: the Mariinsky Theatre’s 3D film version. To the cinema we go. This is the first 3D Nutcracker ever, following the Mariinsky’s 3D Giselle last year – and the screening of dance is a good thing, as few can afford to fly the world over to see a number of Nutcracker productions.The 3D aspect makes the experience more tangible. The best moments are the aerial shots when you feel most interspersed, but as the 1934 Vassily Vainonen version was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet. She was also nothing less than the saviour of the most precious texts in all Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
'Tis the season to be... transported to a magical, mystical extravaganza that will leave your mouth a-gasp, and your festive spirit in overdrive. This is how the lyrics of "Deck the Halls" should read once you’ve been to the Royal Opera House and savoured the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker.The Sir Peter Wright production (1984) begins in the Stahlbaums’ house with a luxurious upper-class Christmas soiree that sees a whole host of diverse guests present. The most individual of all is Herr Drosselmeyer (Gary Avis), godfather to young Clara Stahlbaum (Meaghan Grace Hinkis) who becomes the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It depends what you expect. This is Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. So what do you expect of (a) Matthew Bourne and (b) The Sleeping Beauty? On both counts I’d answer: much more than we get here. Bourne at his best is brilliant - his Swan Lake, his Play Without Words, are two of the most rewarding and entertaining (I mean moving the heart, as well as hugely gratifying the visual palate) shows in dance in the past generation. His Nutcracker! is young, sexy and amusing. His Cinderella came back, revised, two years ago with a poignancy that evidently touched deep into his love for his parents Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So Tony Hall moves from heading the Royal Opera House to taking over the BBC as its new Director-General. I can't for a moment imagine a rerun of that crucial mini-conversation between Helen Boaden and George Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile programming (if you can remember all the way back to mid-October through the cannonfire since) taking anything like a similar course had it been Tony Hall rather than Entwistle.Entwistle prided himself, even congratulated himself on not asking a single question about why Newsnight's investigation into Savile should have any relevance to his programming of Read more ...
james.woodall
Batsheva Dance Company is reaching its half-century, which makes it, as one of the world’s leading dance brands, not quite as old – or as young – as Israel, but Martha Graham helped launch it several years before the 1967 Six Day War. An international mix, it is in fact two companies, the senior one and the Ensemble, currently touring Britain and made up of youngsters who might or might not graduate to the main, Tel Aviv-based troupe. Ohad Naharin has been in charge since 1990, which was also when the junior fraction was created.Naharin’s choreography is inventive, funny, self-interrogative, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a reputation as the prince of unflinching emotional catharsis, Kenneth MacMillan emerged from the Royal Ballet’s triple bill marking the 20th anniversary of his death as a lord of lyricism. The new bill presents MacMillan three ways, his academic instincts, intellectual imagination and emotional vision - a bold versatility you (whisper it) almost never see from today's choreographers. And it was a surprise that the most heart-felt performance came in the elegiac melancholy of his ballet Requiem, commemorating his own death quite as evocatively as it must have originally lamented that of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Make no mistake; this is dancing of the highest order. The classically trained members of Wayne McGregor's company Random Dance demonstrate such exceptional mastery of technique that their movements should have one drooling in admiration. And since they wear little more than vests and pants for this production of FAR, every muscle in their perfectly honed bodies is visible as it tenses and releases, flexes and extends. Rather than being entranced by the beauty and fluency of their limbs, though, I found myself watching with cool dispassion. And soon, I realized I was thinking of the dancers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement Read more ...