ballet
Ismene Brown
Terence Rattigan’s art of concealment is what makes The Deep Blue Sea so rich and true an observation of the way people behave. Being deprived of his concealing mask is the crucial idea of the interesting new play partnering it at Chichester to mark Rattigan's centenary: Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, which incorporates an unproduced Rattigan TV script into a drama of why it was not produced.The two plays, acutely directed for Chichester by Philip Franks, make illuminating contrast, too, purely in theatrical method - Rattigan’s straight-up focus on people in a room and the things Read more ...
judith.flanders
Act IV is the core of Swan Lake. It doesn’t seem so theatrically, being a peculiar 20-minute bolt-on after an interval that frequently lasts longer than the act that follows. But musically it transcends everything that has gone before, its thready little waltz one of the most delicately tragic things Tchaikovsky ever wrote. And balletically, Lev Ivanov’s rigidly structured classicism draws viewers into the terrifying void that is death. While emotionally the frozen swan-maiden of Act II and the brazen strumpet of Act III here merge to create the incarnation of suffering woman.Well, that is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Like planets crossing in the skies, light years apart, but by some ocular illusion coinciding, this conjunction of the two most thrilling young Bolshoi stars in the world and Frederick Ashton’s rarely staged Romeo and Juliet really must be seen. Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev are real-life lovers as well as phenomenal work colleagues and passionate actors. The freshness of youth, the unhindered outpouring of emotion, the finish of their dancing, and their direct stage personalities enrich to bursting a chamber-sized telling of the tragedy that's refreshingly intimate by comparison Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What I love about her is her emotion, her true emotion. She’s a ball of energy and emotion all together, quite an amazing thing. From the first time I saw her, I thought I want her to be my girlfriend.” Ivan Vasiliev, the young Bolshoi Ballet superstar, is talking about his girlfriend - though he could also be Romeo talking about Juliet. His girlfriend is another Bolshoi superstar, Natalia Osipova, and she is of course his Juliet in the ballet of Romeo and Juliet being performed at the London Coliseum this week, and which is a must-see on more levels even than two fabulous young stars who Read more ...
judith.flanders
Mark Twain once wrote of his experience of going to German opera. It starts at 6, he said, and they sing for four hours. Then you look at your watch, and it’s 6.15. This is also an all-too-accurate description of a night at English National Ballet’s Strictly Gershwin. Except that I began to look at my watch after 10 minutes.Old-fashioned ballroom sequins have Derek Deane fatally in thrallI can’t remember ever enjoying any theatrical experience less. The Albert Hall is not in any case a place for dance – dance in the round is a contradiction in terms, it simply means everyone has a bad seat. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Michael Clark brings dancers into Tate Modern in a long shadow cast by some memorable events from choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Now the ground on which Ai Weiwei’s poignant porcelain seeds were piled is swept clean and laid with a striking white-and-black dance floor, with audience seats arrayed on three sides and the massive height of the Turbine Hall politely decked with spotlights. It’s as if Clark wanted to turn the gallery into a dance studio, rather than insinuate dance into a gallery, which may partly explain the unrisen soufflé of th, his world premiere last night. Read more ...
judith.flanders
If an excess of enthusiasm troubles you, look away now. Because this is less a review, more a love letter. Alina Cojocaru has been astonishing audiences for more than a dozen years. Regular ballet-goers attend her performances expecting to be thrilled. I went expecting to be thrilled. What I didn’t expect was to have a ballet I have been watching for 30-odd years suddenly seem new.And yet, it happened. There are good dancers. There are great dancers. And then there is Alina Cojocaru.It is not technique – or rather, not technique alone. There are splendid things Cojocaru does that make you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite selling 300 million albums, being memorialised in stage musicals and computer games and with a feature film about their early career in the works, Queen are still moaning about the press. It's a theme that simmered steadily through this two-part history, with drummer Roger Taylor especially splenetic about the cruel and unusual treatment doled out to his band by first the music papers ("the evil empire"), then later the tabloids.It's true that, in Britain, they did get regular kickings in print (though it's difficult to believe that any rational adult could get seriously upset about Read more ...
judith.flanders
Being a choreographer is harder than it looks. Steps, movement, are just the beginning. On top of that you need to have a sense of theatricality, and then, even more, you need to be able to convey your ideas, through movement alone, to the audience. On these counts, Bern:Ballett’s visit to the Linbury fails to make the grade.Cathy Marston, Royal Ballet-trained, was the Opera House's first associate choreographer in residence a decade ago, and her works have had frequent showings over the years now. She is a serious and dedicated worker, she clearly has big ideas she wants to explore, but Read more ...
judith.flanders
David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly, willing to tell it. As Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet showed, this is not as easy as might first appear. Nixon shoots straight from the hip: he is interested in narrative, he loves answering the question, “What happened then?”In Cleopatra, of course, it’s more a question of what didn’t happen to her: in Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballet galas are a curious institution. They mimic the form of “Greatest Hits” recordings, but what you get are rarely greatest hits, because they can’t be. Dance develops in its own time, its unfolding being an essential part of the magic. Rip a pas de deux (and galas circle around pas de deux like vultures in the Gobi desert) from its context, and you get pure dance, certainly; flashy dance, more than likely; lots of pyrotechnics, almost inevitably. But you don’t get the core, the magic, the reason people return over and over and over.Galina Ulanova was one of the greatest dramatic dance- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Current affairs can be an on-trend choreographer's nemesis. In the new triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night, you could watch a new video-game war-ballet by Wayne McGregor, while blotting out thoughts of the Taliban suicide massacre in yesterday’s headlines, and Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV, with its modish wrecked train set, while trying to forget that yesterday expensive retribution was demanded of Network Rail for the Potter's Bar train crash. Not wholly helpful associating, as neither piece is among their creator’s best.The evening’s success had to hang on the chiffon frivolity of the Read more ...