dance
10 Questions for Choreographer Bob AvianWednesday, 20 February 2013![]()
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. Read more... |
10 Questions for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo's leader Tory DobrinTuesday, 12 February 2013![]()
The bristling chest, the suggestive swell under the feathered crotch, the leering lipsticked mouth, the size 12 pink pointe shoes. Even the name of the troupe tickles the ribs, so serious yet so ridiculous. What's a camp word like Trockadero doing in the middle of a legendary Russian ballet company name? Read more... |
Q&A Special: Choreographer & Ballet-Restorer Pierre LacotteSaturday, 10 November 2012![]()
On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists in timewarps, frenzied cobras, underwater ballets, jaunty tunes, and phalanxes of delectable archeresses. Read more... |
Interview: Carlos Saura, Flamenco filmmakerMonday, 28 May 2012![]()
Carlos Saura is 80, though he looks 60. With a lived-in face and straggly grey hair, he resembles a rebel professor on a 1970s campus. He’s garrulous and speaks a rolling, recklessly elided Spanish. He’s had seven children by four women, one of them Geraldine Chaplin, the actor-clown’s fourth child. This old man from Aragon—he was born in Huesca—has a self-evident lust for life. Read more... |
Q&A Special: Matthew Bourne and the making of Swan Lake 3DTuesday, 15 May 2012![]()
A boy alone in his vast white bedroom has a recurrent haunting dream, frightening yet somehow comforting - a swan invades his mind, simultaneously menacing him with its power and wildness, and yet wrapping its great wings around him to shield him, with some ambiguous kind of love. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Russian Choreographer Boris EifmanSaturday, 17 March 2012![]()
No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Read more... |
Q&A Special: Ballet Guardian Tony DysonWednesday, 16 November 2011![]()
On Saturday one of the master ballets of the Royal Ballet genius Frederick Ashton returns to the Covent Garden stage, Enigma Variations. Its owner is an architect, one of Ashton’s last friends, and one of the handful to whom the choreographer left the small number of ballets he felt would be of financial benefit to them when he died in 1988. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Choreographer Christopher WheeldonSaturday, 15 October 2011![]()
Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the one any audience members other than front-of-stalls ticket holders would have caught. With more focus on the characters and less on the potentially overwhelming special effects, we probably get a better deal. Read more... |
Q&A Special: Ballerina Sylvie GuillemWednesday, 28 September 2011![]()
The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally. Read more... |
Q&A Special: Film Director Wim WendersTuesday, 19 April 2011![]()
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today

“Telstar” was released 60 years ago this week. On 17 August 1962...

First, a bit of housekeeping. Maybe it was the three-and-a-half-hour duration, or maybe the unfamiliar Sri Lankan subject matter, or maybe even...

Klaus Mäkelä, 26-year old chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris, lined up for the same role at the Royal Concertgebouw...


Cass McCombs has something of the detailed, opaque depth of his late peer Jason Molina, with more taste for pop shapes under a broader musical...

Proper music tells stories just about itself, the stern pedagogues insist; it doesn’t (or anyway shouldn’t) paint descriptive pictures of places...

The last couple of series of Shetland (BBC One) brought the...

This is a romantic historical epic with elan, giving sensual immediacy to a fanciful secret history of the Eiffel Tower, here inspired by a...