classical ballet
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 ...
Ismene Brown
There are gunshots outside in the street, a boy sits behind his front door desperate to get to ballet class, the two sides of his life colliding in front of his eyes - reality and dream. It’s a favela in Rio, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a vast estate of poverty riddled with drug crime and addicted young lads with no future other than dealing, until they get shot or jailed. Ballet... well, what an irrelevance.This is the background from which, unbelievably, a fairytale became real. A boy, Irlan da Silva, escaped his certain destiny and this year became a professional ballet Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It is a curious feeling to go to meet a hated figure and find a delicate, blonde girl with a sweet face.On Monday, 23-year-old ballerina Alina Somova opens the batting for the legendary Mariinsky Ballet’s Covent Garden tour in Romeo and Juliet, needing to defy her critics who line up from West to East accusing her of vulgarising the majestic, poised St Petersburg style that defines classical ballet worldwide.Even for a ballerina, in an art where physical evolution seems to move twice as fast as anywhere else, Somova is peculiarly flexible. She throws her leg high over the vertical, even in a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."So it is. And yet Uliana Lopatkina, despite her tender age, is now lionised almost universally as the greatest ballerina today in Russia, a country where they know about such things. Effortlessly, it seems, in the 10 years since a 5ft 9in beanpole with a square jaw and an apparently boneless body Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sir Frederick Ashton, Britain's unrivalled genius at creating ballets, had a simple attitude towards posterity. "You've heard his famous remark, 'Fuck posterity'?" says his nephew, Anthony Russell-Roberts, smiling but eyeing me apprehensively.Ashton's attitude to posterity has not at all pleased a hefty section of his admirers who, since his death in 1988, have consistently accused Russell-Roberts and the Royal Ballet (where he is administrative director) of neglecting Ashton's work. People for whom Ashton was, as the critic P W Manchester remarked, "our youth, and our growing up, and our Read more ...