dance

DVDs for Christmas: Dance

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Ballet has had a difficult relationship with filming for a long time, not only as regards permissions and copyrights from all the people involved, but also in how to frame and light for film a spectacle and action conceived and judged for the stage, live before an audience of a thousand. Perhaps such things held the Royal Ballet back for decades, while the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov and the Bolshoi energetically set cameras rolling on their great stars and landmark productions.

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theartsdesk Debate: Dance's Question Time

Ismene Brown Monday, 07 November 2011

What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers' training, choreographers' creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance world's leading figures was brought together by theartsdesk for a major debate last Friday in central London, as dance faced its own Question Time.

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theartsdesk Debate: The Art of Performance

Ismene Brown Saturday, 10 September 2011

To celebrate theartsdesk's second birthday on Friday, we held a panel discussion on The Art of Performance at Kings Place, London, in the Kings Place Festival.

How Manga Comics Became A Dance

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 06 September 2011

A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more sophisticated admiration for the narrative subtlety and precise visions that the best of comics led to. And to Cherkaoui it seemed a compelling world for theatrical treatment.

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Interview Special: Bolshoi Dancers Natalia Osipova & Ivan Vasiliev

Ismene Brown Sunday, 10 July 2011

“What I love about her is her emotion, her true emotion. She’s a ball of energy and emotion all together, quite an amazing thing. From the first time I saw her, I thought I want her to be my girlfriend.” Ivan Vasiliev, the young Bolshoi Ballet superstar, is talking about his girlfriend - though he could also be Romeo talking about Juliet.

3D Dance looks Skywards with Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

Ismene Brown Friday, 24 June 2011

Last March’s Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, as we know, brought devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese. But it also caused a crisis in the 3D film industry, just as it is attempting to be born. The most important 3D tape stock finishing factory in the world was swept away by the waters.

What Was it Like...? Ballerina Tamara Rojo on Dancing to 12,000 People

Ismene Brown Thursday, 23 June 2011

Last weekend ballerina Tamara Rojo performed to the largest live audience ever to watch the Royal Ballet, at London's O2 Arena. But what was it like facing 12,000 people, and trying with her partner, the Cuban star Carlos Acosta, to tell the intimate story of two young lovers in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet?

Next Royal Ballet chief is smiling insider Kevin O'Hare

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 14 June 2011

There were apparently unanimous whoops of joy inside the Royal Ballet this morning, even as brows were wrinkling perplexedly outside, when it was announced that the likeable No 2, administrative director Kevin O’Hare, will succeed director Dame Monica Mason next year. The smiling insider is to head a team involving two of the world’s leading choreographers, Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, which holds out the promise of a gold-plated twin-track creative approach uniting both...

Ballet's Bad Girl Has a New Sound

Natalie Wheen Saturday, 19 March 2011

Kenneth MacMillan’s dramatic ballet Manon was premiered in 1974 to a chorus of attacks on its tale of a “nasty little diamond-digger”, as one critic had it. Since then the slut who can’t help herself has risen to become one of the most coveted roles in the world for major classical ballerinas (as another critic at the time foresaw), and the ballet is now in the repertoire of some 18 companies around the world.

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theartsdesk in Madrid: Nuevo Flamenco Comes of Age

Peter Culshaw Sunday, 06 February 2011

Miguel Poveda, one of the nuevo flamenco performers appearing at Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival

I am far from the first - and in very good company - to worry about the over-commercialisation of flamenco. As far back as in 1922 Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca, respectively Spain’s greatest composer and poet of the time, decided to organise a singing competition in Granada in which only singers from the villages were allowed to enter. The polished, preening urban stars of the Café Cantantes were ineligible. My resistance to the genre was partly to do with the Gypsy Kings,...