Dance
Ismene Brown
Waves of modern dance history beat upon the shore this week with Rambert at Sadler’s Wells offering four works going back nearly 40 years, and Michael Clark’s newest Britdance creation at the Barbican. The hip people will be at the Barbican, of course, of which more further down. But if you think Clark is a shock jock, you must be as middle-aged as he is - just turned 50 he has, the man with the child in his eyes and nappy pin in his ear. Shocks, by their nature, don't last. Other things matter, like freshness, the capacity always to be new.At Rambert’s four-bill it’s the American veterans Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Has the great ballerina Tamara Rojo ever done a more nerveracking performance than she did last night in Milton Keynes? On her first night as player-manager of English National Ballet, both its new artistic director and its chief ballerina, she had to inhabit the skin of a dewy 16-year-old discovering the world - all the while watching the stage with the steel gaze of a boss to see if her employees were doing their job to standard.This is a model that is essentially unknown to British ballet for more than half a century since Alicia Markova and the Festival Ballet back in the 1950s - Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.Osipova had, dramatically, left the Bolshoi for the smaller and less prestigious Mikhailovsky, to the puzzlement of many. But the Bolshoi streams its dancers: a certain type is classical, another is romantic, another – Osipova’s type – play soubrettes. Her Kitri in Don Quixote (first seen in London in 2007) Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?Indeed, it’s unusual to see a dance film being made at all, let alone picked for a celebrated indie film festival like Raindance this Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ve seen Akram Khan’s Desh twice. The first time I sat in my favourite spot – the front row – close enough to smell the sweat drenching his shirt as the demanding physicality of this ambitious solo work became evident. But I could also see him apparently lip syncing to recordings of his own voice and, despite the potency of his close physical presence, this created a profound sense of disjunction, as though he were emotionally disengaged from the recollections and stories being told. The work is autobiographical or, rather, an exploration of identity – of what it means to be born of Read more ...
james.woodall
When she broke through in the mid-1990s, with her preposterously appropriate surname, Berlin-based Sasha Waltz was all about cheek and chutzpah. Her choreography in pieces such as Twenty to eight and Allee der Kosmonauten was often a satirical take on the local and the everyday. In Körper (“Bodies”) (2000) she delved with physiological and surrealist élan into both the fragility and adaptability of the human form, and through a trilogy of that title laid down her mark as one of the most exciting and wittiest makers of European contemporary dance.Hands more than bodies attempt some kind of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's been eight years since San Francisco Ballet were last here, charming us with their finesse and their smiles - welcome back. They offer a boost of spirit to the gloomsters of ballet over here. This small city which punches many times above its weight in the cultural world owes a vast amount of its self-confidence and charisma to its mixed ethnic roots, so the range of dancers from the Far East via North Europe and the Latino Americas is representative. But only a gifted, purposeful artistic director, which Helgi Tomasson evidently is, can fashion eager youngsters from such varied cultures Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?Bazalgette is descended from the Victorian Bazalgette who built London's sewers, and he has attracted verbal ordure for years for his development at Endemol TV of the reality shows about the petty minutiae of life (cooking, gardening, eating - heavens - Read more ...
Ismene Brown
True originals are those who keep contemporary arts bright, and one of the handful of dance performers who set the 1980s and 90s on fire was a bony, white-skinned, bleakly witty and garrulous physical clown with a taste for the extreme called Nigel Charnock. The news of his death last night from cancer at the age of only 52 feels painful to anyone who suffered and laughed so much at some of his merciless works.Charnock was a scary performer, quite often naked and doing unmentionable things with crucifixes, dresses and pink plastic babies, and he'd thrash himself bruisingly over the floor (or Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The virtuoso Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova will guest with the Royal Ballet this autumn with Carlos Acosta in the opening run of Swan Lake. Osipova, whose partnership with the phenomenal Ivan Vasiliev has become the most talked-about in world ballet, will dance the double role of Odette/Odile (the White Swan and Black Swan) on 10, 13 and 25 October with the RB's Cuban star Carlos Acosta, in place of Tamara Rojo, the ballerina who becomes English National Ballet's artistic director from September.Osipova and Vasiliev caused a sensation off-stage last winter when they quit the Bolshoi to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.The tidy formations and rehearsed moves that please in dance theatre aren't compatible with the unpredictable spontaneity of football, and while kings of grace such as Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane or Dennis Bergkamp bring tears to the eyes with their individual flair, it's the overall arc of a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You now have two choices when you roll down to the bottom of the Turbine Hall's slope. You can go left to the established Tate Modern collection of paintings and sculptures in white boxes, or right to a warren of performance and video art that fills two new large concrete barrel rooms - two options in gallery geometry and art practice. With the help of architects Herzog and De Meuron, Tate have incorporated the two disused oil drums into the gallery to provide a permanent platform for the immersive and interactive art forms that have come to dominate the visual arts over the past Read more ...