Dance
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons and friendly art giants of their generation (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Isamu Noguchi et al). UK choreographers are fortunate to get 10 years until the Arts Council deems it time to push them out of the subsidised nest, to vanish in their late thirties, most of them.Hence the interesting anomaly of Richard Alston, who stands out as the senior Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist 1979 creation Dance, on this week at the Barbican.Minimalism is now a comfortable old sofa for today’s generations of dance-watchers, often handed very small platefuls of ideas, but this 60-minute piece has an understated poise and rich cleverness that shows American modern dance at the very top of its artistic game.Typically of this cool blonde US Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the one any audience members other than front-of-stalls ticket holders would have caught. With more focus on the characters and less on the potentially overwhelming special effects, we probably get a better deal.Jonathan Haswell’s stylish screen direction is dominated, as it should be, by the loveable mug of Lauren Cuthbertson's Alice. She guides us in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone! Dance, at the Southbank Centre, the only possible response is, “Pull the other one” and a firm slap across the hubris.It had started badly with Armitage stepping up in a sparse Queen Elizabeth Hall to lecture us Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Has the great pop diva Beyoncé plagiarised the great modern dance diva Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker? This is the burning question that has today sent disco popsters and fans of austere contemporary dance in a feverish crush to YouTube, comparing Beyoncé’s new "Countdown" vid with De Keersmaeker’s art-house dance Rosas danst Rosas. They’re turning over micro-flashes of Beyoncé, running them back, comparing them with… well, you have plenty of choose from, as De Keersmaeker doesn’t believe in throwing away her ideas in 10 seconds.And without any doubt, as anyone with eyes can see, the resemblances Read more ...
judith.flanders
“Jazz is my adventure,” said Thelonious Monk. “I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.” Based on the title of the new hour-long piece by Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat, Brilliant Corners, named for Monk’s 1957 album, the naïve viewer might expect, at the very least, to hear some Monk. Not so. Gat has produced an always interesting, sometimes absorbing sight-and-sound world, but of Monk, or jazz, there is neither sight nor sound.With a 10-strong company of dancers, Gat uses a darkened stage Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The cool physical activity of McGregor’s Limen, the crimson passions of Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, the symbolic sculpture of MacMillan’s Requiem - the weekend's new triple bill at Covent Garden shows three faces of British ballet-making over the past half-century. While none is the masterpiece of its creator, together they describe an arc over time where lyrical emotion became replaced by gymnastic motion, compression by diffusion, individual idiosyncrasy by a kind of balletic collective.Do I say, dance becomes less interesting thereby? False assumption. The fact that Merce Cunningham’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Death concentrates the mind wonderfully, as they say. In the wake of the demise last week of Alexander Grant, who owned the choreographer Frederick Ashton's world-wide hit ballet La fille mal gardée, the Royal Ballet has announced that it is launching a foundation to "perpetuate the legacy and work" of the distinguished choreographer 23 years after his death.The situation of ownership is complicated. The bulk of Ashton's ballets, whether performable or not, are owned by his nephew, Anthony Russell-Roberts, formerly administrative director of the Royal Ballet. The choreographer left some Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness of being. On two more nights, tonight and tomorrow, this landmark company will perform his dances, and then - like the end of his piece Ocean, which you can see on film tomorrow - when the clock runs out, the last dancer will leave the stage, and that will be the end of it.Few choreographers plan their finale as exactly as Cunningham did before he Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It takes more than utmost craft and rich personality to hold the stage as a soloist - it takes a touch of divine self-belief, which Akram Khan has never displayed to more magnetic effect before than in his new solo DESH. Actually solo is too small a word for this epic, lavish display of the starpower that Khan now emits in the world of dance theatre.This production looks as if it has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to stage, with its luxuriously liberal video animations by Yeast Culture, celestial lighting by Michael Hulls, an ambitiously created live/recorded soundscore by Jocelyn Pook Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You hear the names of the princes and romantic heroines in ballet, but the global success of 20th-century British ballet had much to do with its dramatic acuity and nuancing, the unexpected side characters who in the ballets of Ashton and MacMillan were vastly more interesting than the stock supporting roles of 19th-century ballet. Alexander Grant was the key man in the growth of sophistication in British ballet in the Forties and Fifties, a character performer of powerful personality, and a performer who could out-dance almost any leading man.He died on Friday, aged 86, in London, and Read more ...