Dance
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire carries with it an enormous loading from its past, the associations with those iconic performers on stage and screen Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh not the least of them. For a narrative dance, that hothouse close-up combat between the hapless Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, her sister’s boorish husband, needed a fresh revising and some bravely independent performing. Much kudos to Scottish Ballet for creating and pulling off a genuinely involving new dance-drama which looks as stylish as it feels emotionally substantiated.Director Nancy Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.The all-day event will field a large number of speakers from both the performance and treatment sides. Rojo last week declared after the announcement of her appointment, "I have never been thin and I want for myself and for others to have long Read more ...
Ismene Brown
William Forsythe's position as the most articulate, fascinating, provocative ballet choreographer of the past 25 years is demonstrated by the Royal Ballet of Flanders' brief visit to Sadler's Wells for three nights with his epic, maddening, engrossing creation, Artifact. The cutting edge of theatre and ballet at its premiere in 1984, it is a four-act ballet, no less, that pays homage to the early court spectacles out of which ballet was born, and the superb physical elegance into which classical ballet then evolved.I append below Forsythe's own explanation to me of what it's about, but in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.The ballerina had made clear in an interview with theartsdesk back in 2009, that her eye was set on a future job as a director when she stopped dancing, and on English National Ballet in particular, the touring company where she first showed herself as a shooting star 15 years ago. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Once again theartsdesk brings you its unmatched annual guide to Europe's music, film and arts festivals, complementing the UK festivals guide. With musicians and bands hunting out picturesque places to play in summertime, you can find an alternative Glasto in Serbia or Spain, combine an Italian film festival with your holiday plans. This year's listings include rock in Barcelona, Normandy and Stradbally, film in Venice, Warsaw and Cannes, opera in Bayreuth, Bregenz and Salzburg, dance in Avignon, Epidauros and Spoleto, contemporary arts in Istanbul and Zurich. This is the indispensable Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All year we've had to wait for a world premiere, and two come along at once. Last night was built to make some noise about the three most impressive young names in Royal Ballet choreography, and that will be where the PR story ends, but not where the flat disappointment ends. For while Christopher Wheeldon is shown at his magnificent best in an early piece, both Liam Scarlett and Wayne McGregor's new creations are nowhere near the best that either has shown.They're opposites, but alike in why they fail. Scarlett’s Sweet Violets is an impenetrable jangle of narrative in the old style; McGregor Read more ...
judith.flanders
An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna Karenina to the train station, but the thought crossed my mind.Boris Eifman has always divided the critics. Western audiences tend to respond the way they do to car crashes: they are appalled, but find it hard to look away. Russians, meanwhile, virtually stand on their seats and scream for more. Eifman, who since 1977 has run his own company in the Read more ...