contemporary dance
Laura de Lisle
What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20% extra to buy their “papes”.The 1992 Disney film, Newsies, became a cult classic, and was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway show in 2011 that ran over 1000 performances. The newsies have now burst onto the stage of the shiny Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, backflipping, wise-cracking, and making the most of some mediocre songs.Director/ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When Natalia Osipova comes a-calling, a choreographer doesn’t say no. The Bolshoi-trained ballerina, having commandeered all the prime roles in her nine years at the Royal Ballet, is always looking to conquer new territory. In a string of self-curated solo shows she has made forays into contemporary dance as well as staking out her supremacy as a dance-actress, often commissioning new work.Most memorably, in 2019, she starred in The Mother, a contemporary telling of the pitch-dark story by Hans Christian Andersen, about a young woman prepared to fight Death itself to save her baby. Osipova Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Dance has long had an association with jewels and jewellery, which is something of an irony given that so few of today’s dancers earn the kind of money needed to buy any. Historically, male ballet fanciers would offer expensive trinkets post-performance to their favourite ballerina, and until well into the 20th century it was not uncommon for star dancers to wear their diamonds on stage, heedless of safety or practicality. The glittery little ear-studs worn as standard by the female corps in George Balanchine’s New York ballets are a remnant of that tradition. And it was Balanchine who gave 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
If Carlos Acosta could have bottled the year-round sunshine of his native Cuba, he would have. Instead he did the next best thing and founded Acosta Danza. Seven years later, years which included a UK tour kiboshed by the first lockdown, when the company only narrowly made it on to the last plane back to Havana, the troupe is sleeker, slightly smaller, but if anything even more ebullient. The show currently touring the UK, titled 100% Cuban, may comprise only 80% new material, but it’s the full mojito in terms of sunny energy and pizzazz.The Cuban tag doesn’t only apply to the dancers. There’ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker! had its very fresh charms in 1992 – the classical skit that launched a path to a knighthood, naughtiness nicely bedecked in every shade of pink, on stage and in innuendo. I observed from its press night audience at Sadler’s Wells last night that a good half of them could not have been out of nappies in 1992, or even born. A generation of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Not so long ago, a few decades at most, anyone with a passing interest in dance knew what “modern” looked like. It was earthbound, usually barefoot, and it focussed on mundane movements such as walking or lying down as often as it looked like dance. It sometimes even turned up its nose at being seen in a theatre. Past Present, a programme put together by the dancer Yolande Yorke-Edgell, was designed to shed light on the trajectory of contemporary dance over the past 90 years, prompted by the recent loss of one of its most important movers and shakers (pictured below), a creator and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If I had to sum up in a single impression the work I’ve seen of Brighton-based, Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter (now OBE), it would be that of a rock gig. His shows are noisy, populous affairs, and he writes his own drumbeat-driven music. There is invariably dry ice, harsh stadium-style lighting, and looping crescendos so long and so loud that your vertebrae start to thrum. Double Murder, however, is not like that. It’s a bit of a puzzle, not least because its title suggests a two-part onslaught that doesn’t transpire.“There’s always an assassination at some point” asserts someone Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
So the Royal Ballet is to make a live comeback, for one night only, on 9 October. Fielding the entire company of 100 dancers, suitably distanced, the enterprise is being hailed as a triumph of logistics. And so it is. But the fact remains that the vast majority of its audience will be watching on a computer screen at home. And the gala programme will be pulled from the company’s back catalogue, health precautions having apparently ruled out the possibility of making anything new since March.Not so in Germany, where earlier this month Hamburg Ballet launched its 2020/21 season with a run of Read more ...
Dancing at Dusk: A Moment with Pina Bausch’s 'The Rite of Spring' review - an explosive African rite
Jenny Gilbert
There’s sun and sand, and both are golden – but this is no holiday beach. Distantly, out of focus, you can make out a man with a donkey and cart. Off-camera, some locals kick a ball. A square of sand about the size of a tennis court has been carefully raked in preparation for a performance – a unique performance, as it turns out.Early this year, 38 dancers from 14 African countries were assembled to mount a production of The Rite of Spring in the 1975 landmark version by the late Pina Bausch. It was due to premiere in Dakar in mid-March followed by an international tour. But then lockdown Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest Sadler’s Wells digital offering is 2019’s The Thread, a luminous collaboration between choreographer Russell Maliphant and Oscar-winning composer Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner) for the Athens-based production company Lavris. It’s a striking, contemporary take on Greek folk dance and classical mythology, with a series of abstract episodes forming the 75-minute work. Fragmented, and yet, as the title suggests, subtly woven together – like a collection of disparate beads strung onto one piece of string.Maliphant’s company of 18 young Greek dancers features six performers Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest in Sadler’s Wells’ Digital Stage programme – an impressively assembled online offering to keep audiences entertained during the shutdown – is balletLORENT’s family-friendly dance-theatre production Rumpelstiltskin. It was streamed as a "matinee" on Friday afternoon, and is available to watch for free on Sadler’s Wells’ Facebook and YouTube for a week.The 90-minute work, first seen in 2018 and filmed for broadcast at Northern Stage, was the third successful collaboration between director Liv Lorent and then poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy – once again Read more ...