ENB
Ismene Brown
Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.Shakespeare’s play was premiered in 1596 - not until 1776 did the first opera on it emerge, Romeo und Julie by Georg Benda, a near-contemporary of Haydn and Kapelmeister to the Duke of Gotha who Read more ...
Ismene Brown
English National Ballet turns 60 next week, and nowadays just enduring has to be enough. Smelling of greasepaint and tour buses from the very first, it also smelled of stars - Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin who began it, Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova who created splendid productions for it, and extraordinary late-career performances by Lynn Seymour. Stars have been born in ENB too, even if they burst into full gleam elsewhere - Trinidad Sevillano, Tamara Rojo, and more than likely the young lad who is ENB’s latest find, Vadim Muntagirov, who danced last night in Cinderella.This Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Within two bars of the overture starting, the first flashes could be seen. English National Ballet’s arena Swan Lake at the Albert Hall - they make no bones about it now - is intended for people who rarely go to the ballet. Actually it is in many cases for people who have no compunction about talking and taking pictures through the ballet quite routinely.The most eyecatching movement to be seen last night from my stalls seat was the constant toing-and-froing of ushers throughout the performance to reprimand members of the audience for holding up their damn mobiles in video mode, bold as you Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Visa red tape has dashed English National Ballet’s plans to open its gigantic arena Swan Lake with the scheduled Russian star Polina Semionova. The 26-year-old ballerina from Berlin Ballet was much acclaimed on her debut with ENB in the production six years ago, and her return was expected to make a big splash for ENB’s summer blockbuster, marking the company’s 60th anniversary. But as the swans flock into the Kensington arena, Ms Semionova will still be in the air flying in from Berlin.ENB’s own beauteous Daria Klimentova will lead the swans tonight instead, partnered by another much- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Was it with a hollow laugh that ENB programmed Cinderella for the election period - as a reminder that glittery fairy phaetons are in fact pumpkins with money? Was it a hint that ballet needs political fairy godmothers? With airwaves full of budget cuts, nothing was more welcome yesterday than to go into a Bristol Hippodrome matinee, full of noisy children, and watch this delightful fairytale of wish-fulfilment laid before them. Even better, with the radiant Elena Glurdjidze as the ash girl.This version, made by Michael Corder for ENB in 1996 and now embarking on a UK tour, has the same Read more ...
james.woodall
It's a short run, in London, but a sweet one. At the Coliseum, English National Ballet's revival of a 1971 Giselle is a showcase for a company on exceptionally calibrated form, offering audiences a taste of its myriad talent over six more shows after Wednesday's opening [the cast changes each time - Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below]. On the evidence of the latter, I'd gladly go to all of them: soloists can either shine or die on their feet in this most intricate of Romantic ballets, and if time were not the defeating beast it usually is, it'd be hugely instructive to see over five Read more ...
David Nice
If your heart feels frozen while the ice glitters outside, warm it by reading Hans Christian Andersen's sharp, witty and enchanting fairy-tale The Snow Queen, or listen to the best bits of Prokofiev's erratic but often characteristic late ballet The Stone Flower. You could also drag yourself out into the cold to face Michael Corder's full-length choreography based on the Andersen story, selectively fitted to chunks of the Prokofiev score and interspersing them with other lyric highlights of the composer's Soviet period, but that would have to be a third-best option.Something Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Noughts were a bonanza time for builders, scientists and bureaucrats in the dance arena, throwing up numerous fine dance venues and bases, collaborating intellectually with modern choreographers, or targeting social minorities, but the blazing new trend that captured public imagination dodged all of those - it came up from the street. As if to show that dance doesn’t need all these people to organise it into existence, hip hop was the powerful new physical force in the land, providing all the things that the contemporary dance movement of the Nineties seemed increasingly to ignore. The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It‘s when you see how popstar fame can reach people with more luck than work that Carlos Acosta’s achievement in becoming a truly popular ballet star is underlined. Ballet is just the toughest discipline there is. Great elite artists and great popular artists are generally divided by an insuperable wall; often there’s a sell-out of some kind when the great elite artist achieves wider popularity, the dancer gets cocky or vulgar or goes on too long. But I have to exempt Acosta from that.At Sadler’s Wells this week he is showing just what a ballet-dancer’s ballet-dancer he is. In an evening that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Christmas ballet would be unthinkable without The Nutcracker. But what kind of Christmas should it be? This year the UK fields an astonishing array of visions, from Biedermeier formality at the Royal Ballet, to Fanny and Alexander romanticism at Birmingham Royal Ballet, Elvis cartoons at English National Ballet, and expressionist German psychodrama at Scottish Ballet.Three of Britain's most famous designers, Gerald Scarfe, Antony McDonald and John F Macfarlane, talk here about their preoccupations as they set about picturing the fairytale ballet, and in the gallery elsewhere see a fabulous Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is the look to be Beckmann, Bergman or Nicky Haslam? To accompany the interviews with Nutcracker designers elsewhere, here are three very different design portfolios tackling the eternal magic of this favourite ballet with unexpected reference points. Sketches by John F Macfarlane for Birmingham Royal Ballet, Antony McDonald for Scottish Ballet and Gerald Scarfe for English National Ballet are seen with production stills alongside.Read interviews with the three designers elsewhere on theartsdesk, where they explain their thinking and working methods. John Macfarlane for Birmingham Royal Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wayne Eagling was famous for many things in his 25-year career at the Royal Ballet - not least for his rich girlfriends. There was Isabel Goldsmith, daughter of the late Sir James; there was Francesca Thyssen, with whom he lived for five years. "Who's now the Archduchess of Austria... Yes," he says, with a note of surprise in his voice, "I could ask myself, why aren't I retired in luxury, sitting in Saint Tropez right now?" Instead of sitting in Amsterdam where he has no social life whatever.Probably because Eagling was not a man for a comfortable life - which was why the Royal Ballet sacked Read more ...