dance
First Person: singer-songwriter Sam Amidon on working in Dingle with Teaċ Daṁsa on 'Nobodaddy'Monday, 25 November 2024
Walking in the morning from my Airbnb along the road in West Kerry, a seven-minute walk with ocean on one side and farmland on the other, down to the Teaċ Daṁsa workshop space. I would bring all possible clothes for the short walk because the weather could go through all possible phases in those seven minutes. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Nina Ananiashvili, founder of the State Ballet of GeorgiaSaturday, 03 August 2024
Great ballet dancers who boldly turn away from a stellar international career to grow a national ballet company in their homelands are few, but legendary. Alicia Alonso did it in Cuba, Ninette de Valois did it in Britain. Read more... |
First Person: Ten Years On - Flamenco guitarist Paco Peña pays tribute to his friend, the late, great Paco de LucíaSunday, 25 February 2024
There are moments that forever remain imprinted in our consciousness, engraved on the general map of our lives. I cannot forget the excitement of seeing snow for the first time in Córdoba, aged three or four, rushing to walk on it only to slip straight away and fall on my behind! Or when I discovered the sea, in Cádiz. Read more... |
First Person: pioneering juggler Sean Gandini reflects on how the spirit of Pina Bausch has infiltrated his workTuesday, 30 January 2024
I am a juggler. My wife Kati Ylä-Hokkala is also a juggler. Our life for the last three decades has been juggling. We have been fortunate to be practising this art form at a time when mathematical and creative developments meant that our vocabulary went from about 30 patterns to thousands. The Golden Age of juggling. Read more... |
First Person: Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang on the original Jewish love storyThursday, 12 October 2023
I wouldn’t say that I am super religious, but I am definitely religion-curious. It is a big part of my family background, and, to be honest, a big part of the history of my chosen field, Western classical music. For the past 1000 years, the church has been the most powerful commissioner of Western music, and its most active employer of musicians. Read more... |
Hunting legendary treasure with ballet's Indiana Jones - Pierre Lacotte 1932-2023Wednesday, 19 April 2023
As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it? Read more... |
'You want to cry from loving to do it so much' - Lynn Seymour 1939-2023Wednesday, 15 March 2023
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive. Read more... |
Royal Opera House lullabies for Little AmalTuesday, 26 October 2021
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”. Read more... |
The Royal Ballet - variations on a comebackFriday, 16 April 2021
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious. There will be downsizings. There will be painful gaps where a major talent has given up the fight, retired to run a flower shop or become a hill farmer. Read more... |
'She was Paris': RIP Zizi Jeanmaire (1924-2020)Wednesday, 22 July 2020
"You talk like Marlene Dietrich, you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire, your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair…" . Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Music Reissues Weekly: John Cale - The Academy in Peril, Par...
The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...
Blu-ray: Black Tuesday
The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major...
Conclave review - secrets and lies in the Vatican's inn...
“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t...
Twelfth Night, Orange Tree Theatre review - perfectly pitche...
It's all too easy to underplay the melancholy of ...
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The Other Pa...
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the...
Album: Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles from Abbey Road
When first I clicked on the stream for this album, I really wasn’t sure about it. In fact, I thought I wasn’t going to like it, much as I had...
Expendable, Royal Court review - intensely felt family drama
British theatre excels in presenting social issues: at its best, it shines a bright light on the controversial subjects that people are thinking,...
Senna, Netflix review - the life and legend of Brazil's...
Brazilian Formula One triple-champion Ayrton Senna was already...