Royal Ballet
Ismene Brown
The recorder is indelibly associated with school and dreaded first music classes, but the association will be on a considerably higher plane on 21 June when the world recorder star Michala Petri combines with the Royal Ballet School for a one-off show on Midsummer’s night.Staged at the school’s White Lodge, Richmond Park, the performance is a fund-raiser to redevelop the grade 1-listed 18th-century former royal hunting lodge, which has taken a battering from centuries of first riding boots, then ballet shoes. The programme, titled A Magical Misummer’s Night, has Petri (pictured right) Read more ...
theartsdesk
Johan Persson took the photographs for The Royal Ballet's world premiere of Liam Scarlett's Asphodel Meadows, which opened on 5 May 2010. Read theartsdesk's review of the ballet here.The music is Francis Poulenc's 1932 Concerto for Two Pianos; design is by John Macfarlane, and lighting by Jennifer Tipton. The Royal Opera House Orchestra was conducted by Barry Wordsworth, with pianists Robert Clark and Kate Shipway.Click on a photo to enter the full view and slideshow.[bg|/johanpersson/asphodel_meadows]Opening tableau: Marianela Nuñez, Tamara Rojo and Laura MoreraArtists of The Royal Ballet: Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wonder of wonders - a really cracking triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night. The best of the year, by a country mile, and probably the best for several years: a top-notch beauty from Christopher Wheeldon, the love-it-or-loathe-it Marmite of Mats Ek’s Carmen, and in between a comely and reverberant new ballet from a very young Royal Ballet choreographer who looks set to go places.Liam Scarlett is only 24 but has spent long enough in his schooldays choreographing feverishly to count as an alumnus of best Royal Ballet values. Like Wheeldon, he sculpts graceful, organically flowing balletic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. The book was chosen this morning in a tight finish at the post above Susie Gilbert’s Opera for Everybody: the Story of English National Opera, Andrew Stott’s The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography by Thomas Postlewait and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press). Sheila Hancock presented the accolade Read more ...
james.woodall
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. No one could really be in any doubt that the Royal Ballet would put on a grand show with its new revival of Frederick Ashton's 1960 La Fille mal gardée; but it was only at the end, when a shimmering cast in this always shimmering production took its bow with emphatic gestures to a box up on the right, that some of us in the audience realised who'd been watching [wrote James Woodall on 10 March. Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below.]Prince Charles and his wife are Read more ...
David Nice
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. If in places it still feels like a winter panto - those drag sisters are maybe getting past their sell-by date - a ballerina of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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. Recently theartsdesk interviewee Thiago Soares talked of his preparations to play the central male in this gladiatorial ballet, and last night he made the role of the Foreman his own, taking to the stage like a razor-edged switchblade as the head of the gang of labourers who prowl at night through Canary Wharf and carry girls’ bodies to and fro.Theories about what The Judas Tree means range Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a constantly challenging output of ballets, the remarkable choreographer Kenneth MacMillan produced nothing more upsetting than his last, The Judas Tree. Baldly, it portrays gang-rape, double murder and suicide among a nasty bunch of men on a building site. Brian Elias’s music slashes and bashes frighteningly around the listener’s head; Jock McFadyen’s gritty Canary Wharf set is the epitome of everything sinister about building sites; and above all MacMillan’s choreography takes sexual confrontation to a pitch even he had never matched in the extremes of his uninhibited imagination.He said Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Someone sharp as a whip thought hard about the price-fun balance of the latest Royal Ballet triple bill. An accountant, probably. Deep inside the cloisters of the Royal Opera House, they said: “Now top price stalls are £97 each for Romeo and Juliet, that’s nearly £200 a pair. Interval wine at £6 a glass, £24. A programme, train fares from - say - Windsor at £15 each, plus taxis. That’s £260 for their evening. So for the triple, if we’re going to charge £37.50 top whack, we can hardly give them more than a third of the fun, can we?”You gets what you pays for. The new bill must cap most Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You don’t usually find ballerinas in Monument Valley. Cowboys, maybe, but not a pale, slender girl in a glistening golden tutu alighting like an exotic butterfly briefly on a silk-shod toe in the very same red dust that John Wayne rattled across in Stagecoach. The cover pictures for the Royal Opera House season brochures have fielded some spectacular pictures, but the new spring image is symbolic of the enduring nature of the dancer's will to survive. Sarah Lamb, the translucent blonde from the US, is back on pointe after a year when her career appeared to be over.Breaking her foot in a Manon Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are times when critics sheathe their quill tips, others when they don’t. Rupert Pennefather, the tall blond Englishman who has been earnestly promoted by the Royal Ballet as hard as they can to be the next Jonathan Cope, has attracted some devastating notices, and last night’s emergency outing as Romeo isn’t going to fatten his cuttings file. This new run of MacMillan’s feverish Romeo and Juliet was intended to open with the famed partnership of Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta, heading a rousing supporting cast. But Acosta was injured, and instead up stepped Pennefather, and never 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 ...