fri 22/08/2025

dance

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, ZooNation, Linbury Theatre review - a joyous celebration of differentness

Jenny Gilbert

The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.

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Ballet Nights #006, Cadogan Hall review - a mixed bag of excellence

Jenny Gilbert

It’s exactly a year since Ballet Nights, the self-styled taster platform for dance, started offering chirpily compered evenings of ballet and contemporary at venues where you'd least expect to find them. A first anniversary is already an achievement; to have arrived there bigger and better more so.

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Ashton Celebrated, Royal Ballet review - peerless delights from the master step-smith

Jenny Gilbert

Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet (for whom he created much of it), or elsewhere.

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Rocio Molina, Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival review - mystery and dark magic, with a giggle

Jenny Gilbert

Success in running a large and expanding dance-house enterprise requires knowing when to play safe and when to play with fire, trusting that your audience will come with you.

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The Winter's Tale, Royal Ballet review - what a story, and what a way to tell it!

Jenny Gilbert

If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it.

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All You Need Is Death review - a future folk horror classic

Justine Elias

Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this pleasingly eldritch narrative debut by documentary-maker Paul Duane, it’s unclear whether the forbidden tune will turn out to be a love ballad, a curse, or both.

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MacMillan Celebrated, Royal Ballet review - out of mothballs, three vintage works to marvel at

Jenny Gilbert

Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a valuable legacy for his widow and daughter – companies around the world have an endless appetite for staging them.

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Carmen, English National Ballet review - lots of energy, even violence, but nothing new to say

Jenny Gilbert

The story of Carmen is catnip to choreographers. No matter how many times this 180-year-old narrative has been tweaked and reframed in art, theatre, opera, dance and film, they keep coming back for more – which is curious when you consider that Carmen began life in a saucy French novella read in smoking rooms and gentlemen’s clubs.

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WAKE, National Stadium, Dublin review - a rainbow river of dance, song, and so much else

David Nice

In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow through the world once the world knows it needs it, there’s a rainbow-coloured river of just about everything musical and choreographic that’s found its place in contemporary Ireland, performed with a pulsating energy as well as a poetry that stops you wondering too much about all the connections.

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Swan Lake, Royal Ballet review - grand, eloquent, superb

Jenny Gilbert

In uncertain times like these, the single thing that every flagship ballet company needs is a convincing iteration of a 19th-century blockbuster. New works are all very well and necessary, but they don’t have the pulling power of Swan Lake, or the staying power.

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