contemporary ballet
Hanna Weibye
Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake for Australian Ballet stitches together plot elements from Swan Lake, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor, among other things. No bad thing, that; such mash-ups can work well (see Moulin Rouge), and Matthew Bourne proved way back in 1995 that Swan Lake's story can be totally reconfigured and still work gloriously (we do not talk about the 2011 film Black Swan). But last night's peformance at the Coliseum places Murphy's work for me in the category of might-have-been; lacking either Bourne's mastery of storytelling or Moulin Rouge's campy extravagance, his Swan Lake Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.But it started from a very specific and personal experience. In Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday. The Invitation should be – and is – a shocking piece, but when bracketed by Wayne McGregor's brand new Obsidian Tear and Christopher Wheeldon's 2012 Within the Golden Hour, two particularly vapid examples of contemporary ballet, MacMillan's ballet de moeurs, for all its darkness, has a comforting solidity. It reassures us that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another year, another new full-length story ballet from one of the Royal Ballet's in-house choreographers. Time was – a long time, in fact, up to 2011 – when that would have sounded like science fiction, but no longer: Liam Scarlett, whose Frankenstein premiered last night at the Opera House, is treading a path worn smooth in the past five years by Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor and Carlos Acosta.All have played to type in some respects: Wheeldon with pretty, fantasy spectacles (The Winter's Tale, Alice), Acosta with hispanophone classics (Carmen, Don Quixote), and McGregor Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In London, seeing the same ballet company do three different pieces in three different theatres over four nights would be some kind of festival. In Berlin, it's just business as usual – albeit quite a busy week! – for the hard-working Staatsballett. Wednesday night saw the opening of a new run of John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, with Polina Semionova as Juliet, at the Deutsche Oper, Thursday a performance of Artistic Director Nacho Duato's Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness at the Komische Oper, while last night the Schiller Theater was packed out for Giselle with the Stuttgart Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ever since Diaghilev’s day the relationship of dance movement to its visual design has been a lively, sometimes combative affair. Sometimes people leave whistling the set, saying shame about the dance; other times they hate the set, love the dance. As with the relationship of dance to music, the fit of look to movement can be decisive in why a new ballet escapes the curse of ephemerality and becomes a firm memory that people wish to revisit. It directs the audience how to read it.There’s another difficulty for the dance designer: classical audiences go to familiar ballets with familiar images Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What I want to know is: has there been a major upsurge in boys taking contemporary dance classes this year? And if not, why not? With the amount of male dancing in the media these days, the excuse that boys lack dancing role models just won't wash any more.Last year we had Matthew Bourne and his mammoth Lord of the Flies project, which delivered dance workshops to 6,000-odd men and boys and performed with a different cast of locally-based amateurs in each of its 13 locations. Earlier this year, BBC Young Dancer of the Year was won by 16-year-old Connor Scott, a wild card from the contemporary Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For an art form with a marked penchant for looking over its shoulder, it’s surprising how rarely ballet has exploited its own origins story – not least given the fabled opulence and style of its leading character. The Sleeping Beauty makes a nod to Louis XIV and the court of Versailles in its final moments, but in most ballet goers’ mental archive that’s just about it.Full marks to David Bintley, then, for turning a light on the Sun King and his love of dancing, and for recognising in the story a prime opportunity to create another rare thing: a glamorous showcase for the company’s men. Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body. Then, two years ago, perhaps sighting the end of that particular road, he made a surprising swerve into narrative with Raven Girl, which last night received its first revival at the Opera House.Raven Girl is a fairytale which pays Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When English National Ballet premiered Lest We Forget in April last year, to enthusiastic reviews, they were ahead of the pack with First World War commemoration, and the ambitious modern programme was the first sign of Tamara Rojo's determination to make the company's repertoire more contemporary. But in the intervening 18 months there have been war-themed ballet programmes aplenty, and we have all got used to the sense of dynamism that swirls around ENB under Rojo's leadership. Stripped of these mitigating factors, last night's revival at Sadler's Wells was a chance for the three pieces ( Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When the Royal Opera House told Kenneth MacMillan that Mahler was unsuitable for ballet, he went – where else? – to Germany. Though the success of MacMillan's Lied von der Erde for Stuttgart Ballet led to its happy adoption into Royal Ballet repertoire, making ballet to Mahler still seems to draw German companies more than others – whether because the orchestras, audiences, or state subsidies are better, who knows?But the company visiting the Edinburgh International Festival last night was not that familiar Mahler-exponent, Hamburg Ballet, whose director John Neumeier has tackled eight of the Read more ...