classical ballet
Hanna Weibye
With its hybrid Romantic-kitschy plot, chocolate-advert Tchaikovksy tunes, and baggage of obligatory Christmas cheer, the Nutcracker is harder to get right than you might think if you've only ever seen Sir Peter Wright's Royal Ballet version, now over 30 years old and still practically perfect in every way.The production is the result of research into the St Petersburg original, as well as revisions added 15 years ago to incorporate ideas from the Nutcracker Wright did for Birmingham Royal Ballet, but it feels as effortless, inevitable and magical as a fairytale's "once upon a time". Part of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For an art form with a marked penchant for looking over its shoulder, it’s surprising how rarely ballet has exploited its own origins story – not least given the fabled opulence and style of its leading character. The Sleeping Beauty makes a nod to Louis XIV and the court of Versailles in its final moments, but in most ballet goers’ mental archive that’s just about it.Full marks to David Bintley, then, for turning a light on the Sun King and his love of dancing, and for recognising in the story a prime opportunity to create another rare thing: a glamorous showcase for the company’s men. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Swan Lakes are not created equal. In fact they are not even created the same: ballet is the art form with the evanescent repertoire, in which First Folios – or any folios – are singularly scarce. Even with a classic as beloved as Swan Lake, there is no stable text apart from Ivanov's lakeside choreography for Act II and Tchaikovsky's score (though not even all of that). If a production shines in any other respects as well as these, the credit is due to the creative team and the company – so let's bring the house down for Birmingham Royal Ballet and the utterly splendid Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most - as evidenced by the continuing worldwide success of this all-male comedy troupe after more than 40 years. Now they're in London, and this second programme proves that they can be just as diverse as any great Russian company, taking in as it does the romantic ballet Les Sylphides, the Imperial kitsch-fest Don Quixote, and modern American masters Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Someone more unlike Louis XIV than David Bintley is hard to imagine. The latter comes across on TV as the most pleasant, unthreatening, mild-mannered of Everymen; unthinkable that he would order the massacre of Protestants or proclaim, “l’État, c’est moi.” Yet the quiet poise with which he glides down the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles at the beginning of The King Who Invented Ballet reveals what Bintley has in common with the legendary absolute monarch: he’s a classically trained ballet dancer.As Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Bintley has created a new short piece inspired by the Sun Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
St Petersburg Ballet Theatre is a phenomenon of the new Russia: not anchored in centuries of history or state patronage like its neighbours the Mariinsky and the Mikhailovsky, but founded as a commercial venture in 1994 by Konstantin Tachkin, a wannabe impresario with no balletic training. It tours widely, and evidently has no difficulty selling out foreign theatres – including the Coliseum for Swan Lake last night – with a combination of recognisable productions and "Russian ballet" cachet.The centre of the company's hard sell is their prima ballerina, Irina Kolesnikova, who on this London Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the second piece of last night's triple bill, Hofesh Shechter's Untouchable in its world premiere, my friend asked me why it had been put on the programme with the first piece, George Balanchines 1946 Four Temperaments. He wondered if there was some structural or thematic connection that he had missed between the two wildly different pieces. The Balanchine speaks obviously to the bill's last item, Kenneth MacMillan's 1966 Song of the Earth; both pair a cool neoclassical choreographic idiom with deeply felt but vaguely expressed melancholy. But the best I reason I can imagine for the new Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The premise of last night’s world première made so much sense that one almost wondered why nobody had done it before now. Commissioned by the Royal Opera House and in its downstairs Linbury space, Shobana Jeyasingh, a classically-trained Indian dancer and now director of her own contemporary dance company, would respond to the 19th-century ballet about an Indian temple dancer, La Bayadère, which has wonderful choreography but presents an entirely Western, Orientalist vision of the “exotic” east. Issues of cultural appropriation, objectification and identity would be tackled, dance would get Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The habit among ballet critics of being simultaneously down on John Cranko's 1965 Onegin and up on Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 Manon is a curious one. The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together scores that don't actually use the Massenet/Tchaikovsky operas, to the knotty questions of morality and culpability that attend their titular characters. Perhaps it's because the London public eventually got used enough to MacMillan to decide he was a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The twelve days of Christmas may be over, but I have good news for ballet fans in London: a whole new batch of presents for you has washed up at the Coliseum, and it's overflowing with lords-a-leaping, ladies dancing, and swans-a-swimming. In Derek Deane's production (a vast improvement on his 1997 arena version for the Royal Albert Hall) English National Ballet really have a gem of a Swan Lake: even where I disagree with Deane's decisions, I find the whole package intensely likeable. And when, as happened last night, there are stupendous principals performing the main roles and a corps Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Every Nutcracker has its day, and every day has its Nutcracker. But sometimes history repeats itself, and so it was that I found myself last night in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, scene of my own childhood encounters with ballet, preparing to watch Peter Darrell’s Nutcracker, the very same production that I and thousands of other Scottish children were raised on between 1973 and winter 1996-7, when the (by then rather battered-looking) Christmas favourite by the company's founder was last performed.The company was Nutcracker-less for the next few years, a turbulent time in which it struggled Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This morning, those who follow ballet on both sides of the Atlantic might be feeling a bit like the male soloists at the beginning of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet: turning their heads sharply, almost pantomimically, from side to side. Over there, in New York, Wendy Whelan, the prima ballerina retiring after a 30-year career with City Ballet, made her farewell in a programme heavy on modern masters Wheeldon and Ratmansky, including a world première. Over here, in London, the Royal Ballet performed a quadruple bill of works by Frederick Ashton, its revered and adored founder choreographer, the Read more ...