Royal Ballet
Jenny Gilbert
The urge to redesign a heritage ballet is a curious one, given not just the expense but the fact that the main draw of an old ballet is the steps and the music, which stay the same whatever the stage dressing. The Royal Ballet was keen, however, to mark the 75th anniversary of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella with a new look, and apparently found no shortage of private sponsors who felt the same. This was after all the first three-act ballet to be made in Britain, and had been out of the repertory for a decade. So Cinderella, a story about transformation, has itself been transformed, most Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive.Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Marshalling a mass of bodies around a stage is what all choreographers do. But nobody does it quite like Crystal Pite, the Canadian whose half-hour piece "Flight Pattern" – a comment on the global refugee crisis – was a hit for the Royal Ballet five years ago, earning an Olivier Award.She now returns with a full-evening extension of that material, adding two new sections that address equally big subjects, not least the rights of children to life and safety. This, along with a final section dealing with what Pite calls “the ultimate border crossing”, makes sense of the work’s over-arching Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Although the loss of its 96-year-old royal patron can hardly have come as a surprise, Covent Garden has been slow to register it. The gold-embroidered ERs on those luscious red velvet stage curtains remain in place, and when Wednesday night’s audience was invited to stand for the playing of the National Anthem, the uninvited vocal response was heard to “send her victorious”. Old habits die hard.Perhaps those same loyal subjects were also oblivious to the oddity of the Royal Ballet’s dedication of the opening performance of its new season to the late Queen. Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When George Balanchine said that “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet”, he wasn’t just stating the obvious. He meant that there are some things that simply cannot be expressed in dance. Emotion and nuance are a story-ballet’s native territory; factual complications are a no-go.Yet Christopher Wheeldon has ignored this famous advice in his latest three-acter for the Royal Ballet. The story he chose to adapt, Like Water for Chocolate, the 1989 bestseller by the Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, not only features its fair share of convoluted family relationships but more crucially centres on Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the expectations one might have of a new ballet from a choreographer raised on street dance who has made work about the American prison system, serene loveliness isn’t one of them. The name Kyle Abraham is not new to Royal Ballet audiences, but the squib of a piece he made for a mixed bill last year, Optional Family, gave scant idea of what he would do given 35 minutes of stage time, several more dancers and an orchestra. The Weathering, premiered as part of a contemporary triple bill, is surprisingly classical and utterly gorgeous.Abraham – who turns out to have a string of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.They were written with an unstoppable effervescence and expressiveness in language that sent readers hunting down their dictionaries for words like "borborygm Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unless you happen to be a student of Italian language or culture, the significance of the 14th-century poet Dante Alighieri’s insights into the human condition may have passed you by, albeit that this year marks 700 years since his death. Where every educated Italian knows the stories and characters within La divina commedia like the back of their hand, we British generally draw a blank. That general ignorance is what The Dante Project is up against and it was a fantastic gamble on the part of the Royal Ballet to believe that a posse of creative talents – choreographer Wayne MacGregor, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal Ballet and creator of Anemoi, the 20-minute work that opens the final programme in the company’s 90th birthday season. In the last days of rehearsals the 33-year-old was already on the back foot, re-jigging sections of the piece as several dancers fell prey to injury. Then, 24 hours before opening night, disaster struck and half his cast were Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
People often ask why it is that in ballet there are different casts on different nights, a practice alien to opera, musicals and theatre. The most obvious reason is practical. Ballet companies keep a number of principal dancers on salary who need regularly to strut their stuff. Another reason is that dancers develop distinct individual qualities – technical, musical and dramatic – which imprint on the works they dance. Add to that the mysterious chemistry of partnering, the capacity of one dancer to bring out the best in another, and you begin to understand why hardcore balletomanes beggar Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Opera House wasn't taking any chances when it welcomed its first ballet audience since December this week. There was no printed programme on offer, nor even a cast sheet. “Not till October” said the uniformed man on the door. Some ballet companies have learnt the hard way not to trust that newly lifted lockdowns (lockups?) will stay that way for long. They’re in no hurry to spend time and money on printed material that might end up having to be pulped.The programming felt confident though. The soft option for the Royal Ballet’s comeback would have been a comforting classic, but Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious. There will be downsizings. There will be painful gaps where a major talent has given up the fight, retired to run a flower shop or become a hill farmer. It will take years for the sector to recover.All the performing arts have taken a hammering, and heaven knows this isn’t a competition, but dance, and ballet especially, is a case apart. The technique Read more ...