Dance
james.woodall
Carlos Saura is 80, though he looks 60. With a lived-in face and straggly grey hair, he resembles a rebel professor on a 1970s campus. He’s garrulous and speaks a rolling, recklessly elided Spanish. He’s had seven children by four women, one of them Geraldine Chaplin, the actor-clown’s fourth child. This old man from Aragon—he was born in Huesca—has a self-evident lust for life.Saura made his first feature film, Los golfos, about delinquency in Madrid’s badlands, in 1959. Over 40 works have followed since, including Ana y los lobos (“Ana and the Wolves”) in 1972, with Ms Chaplin (they were Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballo della Regina is a strange piece, for many reasons. A piece of minor Balanchine, it was created late in life for a dancer he clearly admired but who was not core to his vision. Strangest of all, he used music by Verdi, a composer whose music he had only choreographed to in his very early days as a journeyman opera-house ballet-master, when he did not get to choose.So what does the piece tell us? Very little, really. Staged by Merrill Ashley, its original lead, it is efficient, neat, well-rehearsed. And I can see no real purpose to it. The curtain rises on a heart-liftingly familiar Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The past is a hard card to play for a contemporary dance company, even harder than for a ballet company. A work that’s proved over time, whose quality emerges and re-emerges with revisiting, casts an imposing shadow over new works created in the ethos and fashions of the contemporary. Rambert’s director for the past decade, Mark Baldwin, has always turned with love to past works, and he must know that it’s Siobhan Davies’s 1995 The Art of Touch on this 10th anniversary programme that is by far its star, and shows just what richly refined and responsive individuals he now numbers in his elite Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A boy alone in his vast white bedroom has a recurrent haunting dream, frightening yet somehow comforting - a swan invades his mind, simultaneously menacing him with its power and wildness, and yet wrapping its great wings around him to shield him, with some ambiguous kind of love. It's the opening scene of Matthew Bourne's tremendous modern version of Swan Lake, and that resonant image and the tale he unfolds from it has made it a classic of modern theatre, marvelled at around the world. But why it works is the emotion generated by the palpably strange and authoritative physicality of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Einstein on the Beach was meant to be one of the jewels in the crown for the Cultural Olympiad. The celebrated 1970s collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs - which Susan Sontag claimed to be one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the 20th century - was receiving its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre last night, thirty-six years after it was first created. And what we got was a technical shambles.Pretty much everything that could go wrong technically did go wrong. Lighting cues were botched. Drop cloths rose prematurely. Stage hands wandered on from the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.Swan Lake will be given its premiere 3D screening on Monday 14 May, followed by the Q&A session with Bourne, the film's director Ross McGibbon and the producer Fiona Morris. The session, held at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY, will be chaired by theartsdesk's Ismene Brown.The Read more ...
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 ...