dance

Gang-Rape In Ballet: Thiago Soares and The Judas Tree

Ismene Brown Saturday, 20 March 2010

In a constantly challenging output of ballets, the remarkable choreographer Kenneth MacMillan produced nothing more upsetting than his last, The Judas Tree. Baldly, it portrays gang-rape, double murder and suicide among a nasty bunch of men on a building site.

theartsdesk Q&A: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Part 2

Ismene Brown Sunday, 14 February 2010

On Tuesday Mikhail Baryshnikov, just turned 62, will dance again, an evergreen superstar as well as philanthropist. The occasion will be the opening of the Jerome Robbins Theater, his latest project in his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.

Q&A Special: Sarah Lamb, Royal Ballet Cover Girl

Ismene Brown Thursday, 11 February 2010

You don’t usually find ballerinas in Monument Valley. Cowboys, maybe, but not a pale, slender girl in a glistening golden tutu alighting like an exotic butterfly briefly on a silk-shod toe in the very same red dust that John Wayne rattled across in Stagecoach. The cover pictures for the Royal Opera House season brochures have fielded some spectacular pictures, but the new spring image is symbolic of the enduring nature of the dancer's will to survive.

theartsdesk Q&A: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Part 1

Ismene Brown Sunday, 31 January 2010

The great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) marked his 62nd birthday last Wednesday. Even more than Nureyev, Baryshnikov entered the popular mind as something more than a matchless ballet dancer.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Tamara Rojo's Diary

Ismene Brown Sunday, 13 September 2009

The Royal Ballet's leading ballerina Tamara Rojo was holding a large and not old but already battered diary when we met, pages and dried flowers falling out of it, along with notes and photographs.

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Q&A Special: Choreographer William Forsythe Over Time

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 09 September 2009

The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.

Sylvie Guillem, Ballerina in Evolution

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 09 September 2009

The phenomenal French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (b. 1965) has always been a modern woman, for all her classical ballerina dress. She joined the Royal Ballet in 1989 from Nureyev's Paris Opera Ballet, on terms of strictest independence, hardly saying a word to the press, while her image as a brilliant but truculent "Mademoiselle Non" grew and grew.