fri 29/03/2024

Carlos Acosta

Swan Lake, Royal Ballet

The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the...

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South Bank Show: The Male Dancer, Sky Arts 1

Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic...

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The Dream/ Song of the Earth, Royal Ballet

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...

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Royal Ballet, Asphodel Meadows/Enigma Variations/Gloria

“Over the top” is a curious expression. Originating in World War One, to mean going over the edge of a trench and into battle, it has altered by degrees to mean anything extravagant or outrageous. And Gloria, which is arguably Kenneth MacMillan’s...

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Carlos Acosta, Premieres Plus, London Coliseum

For most dancers the first base is to get principal roles. For a star like Carlos Acosta, second base becomes urgent: to find the career path beyond classical ballet. Like Sylvie Guillem he seeks out a new contemporary dance path to fulfil, being...

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My Summer Reading: Dancer Carlos Acosta

Carlos Acosta is not just a superstar dancer with the Royal Ballet and around the world, he is an avid reader - and indeed writer. After writing his autobiography No Way Home, he has also scripted dance shows and is now writing a novel....

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Carlos Acosta, Premieres, London Coliseum

Great stars get lost sometimes. Up there in outer space, ringed with adulation, when they get a mid-life crisis sometimes they get sucked into a vanity black hole. No light emits, just the tatters of an angel who lost his way in his own legend....

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La Fille Mal Gardée, Royal Ballet

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...

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As One/ Rushes/ Infra, Royal Ballet

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...

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The Royal Ballet in Cuba, More4 / The Rite of Spring, BBC Three

There were some odd sights in Christmas Day viewing but none more discomfiting, I’d bet, than seeing a ballerina lying on a physio’s couch having a leg dragged quickly up to touch the side of her head while the other leg lay perfectly still pointing...

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Carlos Acosta, Sadler's Wells

It‘s when you see how popstar fame can reach people with more luck than work that Carlos Acosta’s achievement in becoming a truly popular ballet star is underlined. Ballet is just the toughest discipline there is. Great elite artists and great...

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