contemporary dance
Hanna Weibye
Any partnership that lasts for 20 years deserves a party, and last night at Sadler's was a celebration of the wonderfully fruitful working relationship between choreographer Russell Maliphant and lighting designer Michael Hulls. Both clinking with awards by now, they have been a signficant force in British dance for two decades, and have been right there at some of its key moments – think of Broken Fall, the 2003 piece for Sylvie Guillem and the BalletBoyz which launched Guillem's extraordinary post-ballet career; think of PUSH, the 2005 Guillem/Maliphant vehicle that was the first Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten that no master-text exists. Everyone is free to take the Stravinsky and run. Or rather, dance: as Michael Clark has observed, one of Sacre's gifts to a choreographer is the in-built necessity of dance to the scenario, in which a victim is chosen by a crowd and forced to dance to his or her death.Yet Sasha Waltz, one of Germany's foremost Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A good triple bill should have something for everyone, so Rambert have all bases covered with their latest: rare must be the person who likes neither love, nor art, nor rock 'n' roll. In fact, it's a safe bet that most people like all of them, and so last night's programme at Sadler's Wells was something of a crowd-pleaser – no mean feat for an evening with two new works, created for this season and here receiving their London première.If you want to count in whole numbers, as it were, then Didy Veldman's new The 3 Dancers is probably Art, inspired as it is by Picasso's 1925 painting Les Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What I want to know is: has there been a major upsurge in boys taking contemporary dance classes this year? And if not, why not? With the amount of male dancing in the media these days, the excuse that boys lack dancing role models just won't wash any more.Last year we had Matthew Bourne and his mammoth Lord of the Flies project, which delivered dance workshops to 6,000-odd men and boys and performed with a different cast of locally-based amateurs in each of its 13 locations. Earlier this year, BBC Young Dancer of the Year was won by 16-year-old Connor Scott, a wild card from the contemporary Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you thought the era of the impresario died with Diaghilev, think again. Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler's Wells, has commercial and artistic vision in spades, and masterfully combines them in his operation at the Wells. Witness last night's show, Gravity Fatigue: inviting a fashion designer, even one as visionary as Hussein Chalayan, to create a dance show might seem like a risky (and expensive) venture, but the theatre was packed to the rafters, fashiony types mingling with the theatre's usual dance audience and all convinced they had come there for a major Artistic Event.It Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Parties in someone's back garden are often more fun than those in big fancy venues. Richard Alston Dance Company celebrated its 20th birthday with a big soirée at Sadler's Wells in January, but last night was their cheerful family gathering, held in their home theatre The Place, and offering a hearty buffet of short pieces rather than an elaborate three-course meal. Alongside world premières of short pieces by house choreographers Richard Alston and Martin Lawrance and star company dancer Ihsaan de Banya, RADC debuted a piece by London choreographer Joseph Toonga, and rounded out the meal Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sylvie Guillem is retiring in exactly the same way as she does everything: in her own time and on her own terms. She turns 50 this year, but it’s not that age is finally catching up with her – at least, not in her body, which she acknowledges has potentially many more years of dancing in it. She just wants to go out at the top of her game, and for this most intelligent of ballerinas, that also means a new programme: no easy wallowing in the back catalogue for her, but new commissions from Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, receiving their UK première in this run at the Wells, which will be Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the disappointment of Wayne McGregor’s latest piece for the Royal Ballet, which opened on Monday, I thought last night’s trip to Sadler’s Wells for a new Rambert programme might cheer me up about the state of contemporary dance and composition. Two new pieces were on offer, by rising choreographer Alexander Whitley and Rambert director Mark Baldwin with original scores by Icelander Daniel Bjarnason and Brit Gavin Higgins respectively, alongside a revival of Lucinda Childs’s Four Elements, and there was no sign of the fawning hype that preceded the McGregor opening. Were we in for Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You’re already in the land of the unpredictable with Pina Bausch. Creating unease was her métier. But when she pulls a gag intended to convince you that something has gone badly wrong on stage, and then it really does, the discombobulation is profound.When stage hands brought on a portable ballet barre, some 110 minutes into Thursday night’s opening performance of Ahnen (German for “ancestors”, but also “foreboding”), a few hearts among the Sadler’s Wells audience may have leapt: ah, at last, they thought, we’re going to get something more like dance. But the barre was a trapeze for Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Lest the BBC Four imprint prove not strong enough a signal, I'll say it loud and clear: don't go into this expecting Strictly, kids. On the evidence of last night's contemporary dance showdown, the first of four section finals, the brand new BBC Young Dancer competition is light years from the razzmatazz, sparkling scoreboards and celebrity judge infighting of the BBC One dance flagship.The first minutes offered the briefest sketch of contemporary dance's history and a couple of major choreographers as talking heads: distinctly more documentary than docu-soap. The ever-thoughtful and 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 ...