sat 26/04/2025

dance

The Forsythe Programme, English National Ballet review - brains, beauty and bravura

Jenny Gilbert

It’s hard to think of anyone even half as persistent as William Forsythe in changing the conversation around ballet. The American choreographer first came to notice with what became the defining dancework of the late 1980s.

Read more...

Sad Book, Hackney Empire review - What we feel, what we show, and the many ways we deal with sadness

Jenny Gilbert

Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen.

Read more...

Balanchine: Three Signature Works, Royal Ballet review - exuberant, joyful, exhilarating

Helen Hawkins

Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching. Neary has been working with the RB as a coach, advisor and stager of Balanchine’s work for the past 57 years. “Oh yes!” was her emphatic answer.

Read more...

Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet review - Shakespeare without the words, with music to die for

Jenny Gilbert

1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the block to see The Sound of Music (a critical flop), the Royal Opera House had another kind of hit on its hands.

Read more...

Light of Passage, Royal Ballet review - Crystal Pite’s cosmic triptych powers back

David Nice

“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its seemingly static surface. 44 dancers of all ages, soprano, orchestra and design all work towards a timeless work of art, resonating now but bound to hold up in whatever future remains to us.

Read more...

Vollmond, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz, Sadler's Wells review - clunkily-named company shows its lighter side

Florence Roberts

Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.

Read more...

Phaedra + Minotaur, Royal Ballet and Opera, Linbury Theatre review - a double dose of Greek myth

Jenny Gilbert

Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.

Read more...

Onegin, Royal Ballet review - a poignant lesson about the perils of youth

Jenny Gilbert

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.

Read more...

Northern Ballet: Three Short Ballets, Linbury Theatre review - thrilling dancing in a mix of styles

Helen Hawkins

Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition. 

Read more...

Best of 2024: Dance

Jenny Gilbert

In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having missed but whose success would almost certainly ensure a second run.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - mi...

“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events...

Ben and Imo, Orange Tree Theatre review - vibrant, strongly...

Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmings (Kevin...

Stelios review - Athenian rhapsody in blues

The English title of a new film about the legendary singer-guitarist Stelios Kazantzidis, who popularised rebetiko, which is often called “the...

Album: Dr Robert & Matt Deighton - The Instant Garden

There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher;...

The Accountant 2 review - belated return of Ben Affleck...

It’s been nine years since Ben Affleck’s original portrayal of Christian Wolff in The Accountant, who’s not only an accountant but also a...

The Inseparables, Finborough Theatre review - uneven portrai...

The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where...

The Ugly Stepsister review - gleeful Grimm revamp

Although both of the Brothers Grimm died around 1860, they still insist on getting dozens of film and TV credits in each decade of our...

Album: Self Esteem - A Complicated Woman

Given that Prioritise Pleasure was Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (RLT) Back to Black, and that there’s been a lengthy...