Royal Ballet
Like Water for Chocolate, Royal Ballet review - splendid dancing and sets, but there's too much plot
Helen Hawkins
Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.Which is not to say it doesn’t provide many pleasures along the way, not least its superb stage pictures, which start right from curtain up, when we see a long line of Frida Kahlos in wedding dresses and Day of the Dead masks, who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A new Giselle? Not quite: the production that Japan’s national company has brought over for its first British visit isn’t a radical Akram Khan-style makeover. What it offers is a tasteful refreshing of a great classic, like meeting an old friend with a new haircut. This is a Giselle with many local connections. Behind it is the company’s artistic director, Miyako Yoshida, a favourite principal at both Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet, where she danced the title role many times. Staging and additional steps are by the Royal Ballet dancer turned choreographer Alastair Marriott Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.In our own century, Christopher Wheeldon, who started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, has had no difficulty straddling the divide between pointework and hoofing – or moonwalking, come to that. In the very same week that this mixed bill devoted to his work opened at the Royal Opera House, he nailed down an Olivier award for his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching. Neary has been working with the RB as a coach, advisor and stager of Balanchine’s work for the past 57 years. “Oh yes!” was her emphatic answer.Neary, who didn’t even hang up her pointe shoes until she was 70, has now decided to spend more time with her husband in Los Angeles. In its new all-Balanchine triple bill, the company shows how thoroughly Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the block to see The Sound of Music (a critical flop), the Royal Opera House had another kind of hit on its hands. A new three-act ballet closely based on Shakespeare’s text, it presented Romeo and Juliet – in tune with the zeitgeist – as real, impulsive, hormonally charged teenagers. After the curtain, the standing ovation went on for 40 minutes.Sixty Read more ...
David Nice
“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its seemingly static surface. 44 dancers of all ages, soprano, orchestra and design all work towards a timeless work of art, resonating now but bound to hold up in whatever future remains to us.A confession first: until last night, I’d never heard the Polish composer’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, his Third, in a live performance. The media circus around the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra – a work he called a cantata but which is more like sung psychodrama – uses the poet Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre to explore the fallout from the character’s disastrous sexual journey. Marrying the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.Undaunted by the existence of two famous operatic treatments, John Cranko – then director of Stuttgart Ballet – saw the potential for wordless drama in what was Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella? Prokofiev’s two great scores have provided the Royal Ballet with a pair of popular hits, though Macmillan’s R&J has probably been the bigger draw, its Capulets ball music sampled everywhere from TV commercials to Sunderland FC’s pre-match stadium anthem.Cinderella, for me, is the better listen, but is it the better basis for a dance narrative? After a somewhat lacklustre opening night for its latest run at the Royal Opera House, it didn’t seem so. One problem is that, unlike R&J's, the score has a tendency to meander and doodle, stop and start, so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Valiant souls who have recently read the Margaret Atwood trilogy on which this new Wayne McGregor piece for the Royal Ballet is based will be at home with its time-shifting eco-sci-fi narrative. The rest of us, not so much.The appeal of the basic plot is clear: how big pharma coped with a devastating pandemic that has wreaked havoc on an increasingly plundered Earth. (NB the novels appeared between 2003 and 2013, long before the pandemic; and McGregor’s first planning, collaborating with the National Ballet of Canada, to create a piece on them, began in 2017.) Restocking the world with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2022, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz made a duet on Royal Ballet principals William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan, which they performed at the company’s Diamond Celebration. That piece has now evolved into a true gem.Or Forevermore is Tanowitz at her most larky. In its 30-minute span, it takes many of the conventional pieties of ballet and amusingly but firmly disrupts them. We start outside the ROH’s majestic red curtains, where a spotlight picks out a dancer (O’Sullivan on opening night) in a plush garnet-red tracksuit. A sultry sax and bluesy strings accompany her as she Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed with quirky detail, much of it surely never intended to go anywhere but over the heads of its original child readers.Yes, it may have been written for and about a 10-year-old, but Alice Liddell was clearly a precocious little girl. If eye-boggling phantasmagoria on a scale approaching that of the Olympics opening ceremony is what you want from your Read more ...