Dance
Ismene Brown
There must be a protest movement going on in Birmingham’s ballet against London’s - if down south they insist on Kenneth MacMillan’s box-office blasters, so in the Midlands it’s Frederick Ashton’s more fragile work that reigns. BRB director David Bintley’s northern chip on the shoulder has its uses, and especially this spring. After his hugely entertaining Hobson’s Choice last week, here is a double bill of Antiques Roadshow Ashton that it's unlikely today's Royal Ballet (trying so consciously to be hip) would think of rediscovering.Its problem, soberly, is that both pieces are difficult to Read more ...
judith.flanders
The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape begins before the house lights dim, his sharp, vibrant phrases giving a sense of urgency to the audience before they have even settled down.Once the curtain goes up, Alston and his dancers manage the extraordinary feat of making the complex layers of music (the clarinet, played by the splendid Roger Heaton, is soon joined by James Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's a rare ballet where the culmination you hope for is that the young guy gets to take over the business (an idea for a Murdoch ballet there, one day?). David Bintley's Hobson's Choice is surely his very best work, unmitigated pleasure for the spectator - an innocent, beautifully executed period comedy full of atmosphere, good characters, a perfect emotional arc and a perfectly brilliant musical score. None of this is simple to carry off.Made in 1989 for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet - as Birmingham Royal Ballet used to be - it takes Harold Brighouse's 1915 play, and possibly more famously Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fascinating news of the errant Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, apparently not lost to ballet just yet. Following his sudden walkout from the world-famous company where he was trained and nurtured as the most promising young man for decades, he is returning to Sadler's Wells in a mere three weeks with the independent programme of male ballet put on by his compatriot-in-rebellion Ivan Putrov.The programme, entitled Men in Motion, was hit on its opening in late January by the tsunami of publicity surrounding Polunin and by the less positive effect of the last-minute unavailability of three of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet has outlined its 2012-13 season for its home base in Birmingham, indicating a shrunken repertoire due to subsidy cuts, but with a new full-length family ballet by David Bintley, Aladdin.The season will celebrate the art of storytelling, says the company, and some performances will have early starts to pitch at families. Only one mixed bill is announced, attesting to the damage done to the broader performance repertoire by the swingeing cuts in grant.Touring dates and venues will be added. Autumn-Winter 2012 19-22 September, Swan Lake, The Lowry, Salford. Sir Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sudden and disconcerting news from English National Ballet where it's just been announced that artistic director Wayne Eagling is to step down this summer. The company gives no reason for this exceedingly short notice, which leaves them having to advertise the third most significant job in British ballet within the next few days, and a precipitate appointment procedure only weeks after the departure of their managing director.Eagling, 61, a former star of the Royal Ballet, has been ENB director since 2005, and while heading a company of fairly stagnant and repetitive touring repertoire, has Read more ...
Ismene Brown
English National Ballet's 2012 summer is studded with events to build new audiences, with a new version for children to introduce them to The Sleeping Beauty, collaborations with Tate Britain and hip hop, and a special Olympics event uniting Scotland, Wales and English in ballet.A season of ballets inspired by the Ballets Russes will bring some new commissions to the stage, and the company dances through the Olympics period with their fine theatrical version of Swan Lake, both events hosted at the London Coliseum. Autumn and winter see the return of their grown-up Sleeping Beauty and their Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Flamenco is a fervently political dance language, riddled with subversion of class and gender rankings, honouring old people, hallowing sexual prowess, relishing mavericks, and yet commanding a special symbolic force when it's disciplined into a cuerpo de baile. The story of Fuenteovejuna is of uprising by peasants goaded too far by a vicious military whose assumption of the right to rape and pillage leads to comeuppance - a murder in which every one of the villagers takes shared responsibility and shouts, “Yo!” - “It was I!” That shout of individuality, yet blood-brotherhood, is flamenco in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For General Circulation, are some of his observations on the arts and culture of this foreign city, intervals of refreshment between the widespread social ills that he was principally reporting upon. Dickens on Broadway Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway!The beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Like a bleached Mount Parnassus for the gods, pouring linen down steep slopes in foaming white rivers, streaming white curtains up into heaven, few stage sets I’ve seen for a dance piece have been as captivatingly gorgeous as Es Devlin and Bronia Housman’s mountainous creation for Russell Maliphant’s new work. The dancers too are draped in white like gods - or statues to be unwrapped from dust-sheets. The visual metaphors cunningly overlap, for this is a work in which Maliphant intends homage to the art of sculptors, notably the French neo-classical rebel, Auguste Rodin.It comes across as Read more ...
judith.flanders
Site-specific work has been flavour of the month for many many months now, and when the site is as spectacular as the Old Vic Tunnels, one understands why. Nearly 3,000 square metres of tunnelling under Waterloo Station (the trains rumble steadily overhead), the site has in its year as a venue been the location of the first showing of Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a participant in last year’s LIFT festival, and Alan Moore, the V for Vendetta graphic comic genius, even read there.Interestingly, as that list suggests, none of the works have been literally “site-specific”, that is, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two hundred years ago in Durham taverns you could find men in wooden clogs clattering on the tables, with their mates pressing their ears to the underside of the surface. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, African slaves with bare feet were shuffling on dirt with metal bottle caps held between their toes. Now picture a Mediterranean gypsy dancing of sorrow and pain with swirling shawls and angrily pounding heels. Three quite different scenes, different places, different eras, but all rooted in one human impulse, common the world over.Rhythm, in its expressive sense, has been quietly Read more ...