Royal Ballet
judith.flanders
"I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works," accuses the Mad Hatter. "It was the best butter," replies the March Hare apologetically, in Lewis Carroll’s original tale. Butter might or might not suit the works onstage in the Royal Ballet’s everything-including-the-kitchen-sink version of Alice in Wonderland. We’ll never know, since Christopher Wheeldon has not used any butter at all, allowing his audience the merest scrape of choreographic margarine. If you like video tricks, dazzling projections, special effects and Uncle-Tom-Cobbleigh-and-all, then this Alice in Wonderland is for you. If, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This show was intended to be all about the men (see title). But it was the woman in motion who stormed off with the honours in this second edition of what has become tagged as the Sergei Polunin show. And a heavy, maternally hipped, middle-aged woman at that - step forward, the sensational Dana Fouras, a dancer of genius who blew every other performer off the stage in Russell Maliphant’s Two (including the hapless gentleman trying to duplicate her movements on the other side of the stage).Men in Motion Part 2 was surely an impromptu media event, created by the storm of press surrounding Read more ...
Ismene Brown
World premieres, new faces, lower ticket prices (and the first recycled opera production). The Royal Opera House announced a bullish attitude today as it enters the austerity post-Olympics period for next season with six ballet premieres and six new opera productions. Ballet headlines are that the leading Russian choreographer of the era, Alexei Ratmansky, will create a work for the Royal Ballet - as will Christopher Wheeldon. Radical abstractionist Wayne McGregor will create his first narrative ballet, and the rising young Liam Scarlett will create his first full-length ballet.Both Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Boy George will be in a live line-up of singer-performers for the latest Royal Ballet premiere by Wayne McGregor. Mark Ronson's cycle of nine love songs, orchestrated by Rufus Wainwright, will be performed by the former Culture Club New-Romantic (he's now 50), alongside Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Jonny Pierce of The Drums, Hero Fisher, Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow, and rappers Wale and his protégé Black Cobain during the six-performance run next month.The singers will apparently be onstage with the dancers in the work, called Carbon Life, and designs by Gareth Pugh, whose flamboyant club Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.Hamilton, a blonde beauty of 23, is the most interesting performer of young-generation girls at Covent Garden, an Irish child and late starter rejected by the Royal Ballet School, who refused to be Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fokine, the founding choreographer of the Ballets Russes, wrote on Anna Pavlova’s death, “Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement.” The superb array of international stars of ballet last night showing up at the Coliseum to honour Pavlova a century later had to set you thinking, all over again, about why this particular ballerina remains worldwide the epitome of what people imagine about the ballet.Pavlova had miserable beginnings - she was the illegitimate child of a laundry-woman in St Petersburg, and once she entered the ballet world she Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Oberon in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was the hurdle at which the ferociously promising young Sergei Polunin refused when he quit the Royal Ballet last week, and whether it was the deceptive complexity and difficulty of it that caused his sudden exit, last night’s opening gave his replacement, the brilliant Steven McRae, such a run for his money that it wouldn’t be surprising if the role had indeed left Polunin in a blue funk.Ashton’s balletic reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is almost 50 years old now and its charms and nimble wit seem enhanced every time one sees it. So Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that this isn’t the first time that company has mislaid one of its finer talents. Ivan Putrov, who masterminded it, was also a splendid young principal who lost his compass inside Covent Garden, and last year sheared off to join the contemporary dance world.For Men in Motion he invited Polunin to join him and five others in a male-centred programme that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden's most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company in a stunning shock that today sent consternation throughout the ballet world from the USA to Japan. But tonight Royal Opera House chief executive Lord Hall said that he believed the company should support the dancer in "thinking about his life - the pressures on him are enormous", indicating that Polunin was undergoing a crisis and the door to his company remains open.The Ukrainian, still only 21, rose rapidly through ranks within two years of joining the Royal Ballet Read more ...
judith.flanders
A few years ago, the word was that a new choreographer was showing interesting things. His name was Liam Scarlett, and although he was very young, some work that had been seen in a workshop was looking promising. It was not long before “promising” became actuality, and Scarlett’s first piece, Asphodel Meadows (main picture), was premiered on the Opera House stage. Now in Draft Works, an evening of 10 pieces by burgeoning choreographers connected with the Royal Ballet, we once again get a chance to see works-in-progress, to get in on the ground floor and be able, later, to say, “I was there Read more ...
judith.flanders
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)By contrast, the Wellcome’s show of ex-voto panels from Mexico (main picture, above), the small thanks-offerings painted to record miraculous intercessions from the saints in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible.An incredible cornucopia of ballerina artistry showed that the interpretation of existing work is just as necessary to the soul as the surprise of new creation. Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Read more ...