Dance
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 ...
Ismene Brown
Oberon in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was the hurdle at which the ferociously promising young Sergei Polunin refused when he quit the Royal Ballet last week, and whether it was the deceptive complexity and difficulty of it that caused his sudden exit, last night’s opening gave his replacement, the brilliant Steven McRae, such a run for his money that it wouldn’t be surprising if the role had indeed left Polunin in a blue funk.Ashton’s balletic reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is almost 50 years old now and its charms and nimble wit seem enhanced every time one sees it. So Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that this isn’t the first time that company has mislaid one of its finer talents. Ivan Putrov, who masterminded it, was also a splendid young principal who lost his compass inside Covent Garden, and last year sheared off to join the contemporary dance world.For Men in Motion he invited Polunin to join him and five others in a male-centred programme that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden's most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company in a stunning shock that today sent consternation throughout the ballet world from the USA to Japan. But tonight Royal Opera House chief executive Lord Hall said that he believed the company should support the dancer in "thinking about his life - the pressures on him are enormous", indicating that Polunin was undergoing a crisis and the door to his company remains open.The Ukrainian, still only 21, rose rapidly through ranks within two years of joining the Royal Ballet Read more ...
judith.flanders
A few years ago, the word was that a new choreographer was showing interesting things. His name was Liam Scarlett, and although he was very young, some work that had been seen in a workshop was looking promising. It was not long before “promising” became actuality, and Scarlett’s first piece, Asphodel Meadows (main picture), was premiered on the Opera House stage. Now in Draft Works, an evening of 10 pieces by burgeoning choreographers connected with the Royal Ballet, we once again get a chance to see works-in-progress, to get in on the ground floor and be able, later, to say, “I was there Read more ...