dance
Gnosis, Akram Khan, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 27 April 2010
Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, or recognition. Surely Akram Khan has some unusual intuition about what it means to die, since his latest creation is truly a dance of death and the gods certainly seem to have been bent on preventing it. Read more... |
Pictures from an Exhibition, Sadler's WellsSunday, 25 April 2010
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck. Read more... |
La Fille Mal Gardée, Royal BalletWednesday, 21 April 2010
If you're going to dance before the future King of England, and your company bears his family's crest, you'd better dance well. Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London ColiseumTuesday, 20 April 2010
Good dancing - never mind great dancing - calls for an investment of imagination in every point of the foot, every raise of the arm. Why otherwise do the constant drill of turning out the leg, stretching the instep, taking fifth position, if the performer does not find something to stimulate them to make it personal, to dream it, to claim it for their own nuance? Does the violinist play Schubert thinking that it is enough just to get the notes right? Read more... |
Cinderella, Royal BalletSunday, 18 April 2010
No longer, it seems, need ballet's most transformable heroine languish by the seasonal fireside. It's true that you'll have to wait until Christmas to see the most visually striking Cinderella of all again - Ashley Page's fitfully ingenious Scottish Ballet version showcasing magical designs by Antony McDonald. But English National Ballet's Cinders is out and about this spring, and now Ashton's first full-length triumph returns with period glitter to Covent Garden. Read more... |
Mark Morris's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, London ColiseumThursday, 15 April 2010
In 1988 young contemporary choreographer Mark Morris, newly installed in Brussels’ munificent Théâtre de la Monnaie as resident dancemaker to succeed the Emperor of Big, Maurice Béjart, thought not just big but grandly off-beam. Read more... |
Magia de la Danza, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, London ColiseumTuesday, 06 April 2010
“It’ll be tricky to write about,” said the man next to me last night, a Cubaphile. “It's the good, the bad and the awful.” The Cubans’ second programme, The Magic of Dance, is an old-fashioned warhorse of showstoppers from the classics, a tapas bar of Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Coppelia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Gottschalk Symphony. Come again, the last one? It’s a company conga by Alicia Alonso. Enough said. Read more... |
Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSunday, 04 April 2010
A house of contact, a place to make contact - this bare, evocative title sits on one of Pina Bausch’s most appealing works, and also its most elastic. Brought this week to the Barbican posthumously, staged by her company on two amateur casts, Kontakthof didn’t look 32 years old, it looked both timeless and as fresh as fledglings cracking out of their egg shells. Read more... |
Swan Lake, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, London ColiseumWednesday, 31 March 2010
In the Cuban National Ballet’s Swan Lake fourth act, the corps of swans do a curious, aggressive attacking run you don’t see in any other production - they lower their heads and charge at Prince Siegfried, with hands fluttering angrily behind them, as if they were the evil magicians, not the creatures under a spell. Read more... |
Concerto/The Judas Tree/Elite Syncopations, Royal BalletTuesday, 30 March 2010
Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...
DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just...
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manch...
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming...
Banging Denmark, Finborough Theatre review - lively but conf...
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of...
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, Listening
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great...
Music Reissues Weekly: Linda Smith - I So Liked Spring, Noth...
Three years ago, the release of Till Another Time 1988-1996 generated a thumbs up. A compilation of recordings by the Baltimore and/or...
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river...
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this...