dance
theartsdesk in Paris: San Francisco Ballet 1Thursday, 17 July 2014
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for the Parisian performing arts, the festival prospered, and in this its 10th year, has brought the Americans back with a stonking programme. Read more... |
La Bayadère, Mariinsky Ballet, Live Cinema BroadcastTuesday, 15 July 2014
La Bayadère is one of the ballets I recommend to people who have never seen ballet before. It has high drama, exquisite tragedy, fabulous costumes, one of the best "white" acts going, and it almost passes the Bechdel test. Sitting in a mostly empty Vue cinema in Harrow watching last night’s live broadcast from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, I had a chance to try my own prescription. Read more... |
Royal Ballet School Matinée, Royal Opera HouseMonday, 14 July 2014
This is the heart-wrenching time of year when dance school students give their graduation performances and professional dancers bow out at the end of their careers. How poignant to watch Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Nicolas Le Riche, alone on the vast Palais Garnier stage, bidding farewell to his fans at 42, and then to witness Royal Ballet School youngsters making their debuts en masse at the Royal Opera House. Read more... |
Diaghilev Festival Gala, London ColiseumMonday, 14 July 2014
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Read more... |
The Golden Cockerel, Diaghilev Festival, London ColiseumThursday, 10 July 2014
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Read more... |
Sehnsucht/Schmetterling, Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 01 July 2014
No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. Read more... |
Swan Lake, Dada Masilo, Sadler's WellsThursday, 19 June 2014
There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, English National Ballet, Royal Albert HallSunday, 15 June 2014
What a difference a change of cast can make to a show. On Wednesday night I saw Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta as the titular lovers in English National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall (see below for that review). Last night it was the turn of ENB’s other Royal Ballet emigrée, Alina Cojocaru, and guest star Friedemann Vogel of Stuttgart Ballet. Read more... |
Les Rendezvous/Dante Sonata/Façade, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeSunday, 08 June 2014
“The touch is light. We like it so,” wrote Ninette de Valois in one of her later poems. You didn’t know the founder of the Royal Ballet wrote poetry? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much – except the occasional phrase which can serve as an epigraph for early English ballet. Read more... |
The Dream/Connectome/The Concert, Royal BalletSaturday, 07 June 2014
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Read more... |
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