sat 02/08/2025

dance

10 Questions for Choreographer Bob Avian

Jasper Rees

A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it.

Read more...

10 Questions for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo's leader Tory Dobrin

Ismene Brown

The bristling chest, the suggestive swell under the feathered crotch, the leering lipsticked mouth, the size 12 pink pointe shoes. Even the name of the troupe tickles the ribs, so serious yet so ridiculous. What's a camp word like Trockadero doing in the middle of a legendary Russian ballet company name?

Read more...

Q&A Special: Choreographer & Ballet-Restorer Pierre Lacotte

Ismene Brown

On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists in timewarps, frenzied cobras, underwater ballets, jaunty tunes, and phalanxes of delectable archeresses.

Read more...

Interview: Carlos Saura, Flamenco filmmaker

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.

Read more...

Q&A Special: Matthew Bourne and the making of Swan Lake 3D

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.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Russian Choreographer Boris Eifman

Ismene Brown

No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay.

Read more...

Q&A Special: Ballet Guardian Tony Dyson

Ismene Brown

On Saturday one of the master ballets of the Royal Ballet genius Frederick Ashton returns to the Covent Garden stage, Enigma Variations. Its owner is an architect, one of Ashton’s last friends, and one of the handful to whom the choreographer left the small number of ballets he felt would be of financial benefit to them when he died in 1988.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon

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.

Read more...

Q&A Special: Ballerina Sylvie Guillem

Ismene Brown

The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally.

Read more...

Q&A Special: Film Director Wim Wenders

james Woodall

Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
theartsdesk at the Three Choirs Festival - Passion in the Ca...

“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at...

Natalia Ginzburg: The City and the House review - a dying ar...

Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre...

Album: Mansur Brown - Rihla

I like to think I’m open to most things, but even so I never thought that I’d be getting an education in prog metal in the summer of 2025. Let...

BBC Proms: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Kaljuste rev...

Arvo Pärt was into his 40s before he made had his Big Musical Idea: simplicity. He has spent the subsequent half-century pursuing this ideal,...

Top Hat, Chichester Festival Theatre review - top spectacle...

After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive...

Late Shift review - life and death in an understaffed Swiss...

Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed...

Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Alright Sunshine / K Mak at t...

Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ...

The Naked Gun review - farce, slapstick and crass stupidity

The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and...

Album: Reneé Rapp - Bite Me

The stage musical update of Mean Girls, and the film adaptation, pushed Reneé Rapp into the public eye. She played queen bitch Regina...