dance

Quatrain/Kin./Les Rendezvous, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Crescent Theatre

Hanna Weibye Sunday, 27 April 2014

It is proof, as if more were needed, of how very right-on Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director David Bintley is, that he chose to open the International Dance Festival currently taking place in that city with two specially commissioned ballets from emerging choreographers who started their dancing careers with the company: Quatrain by Kit Holder and Kin. by Alexander Whitley.

Rodin, Eifman Ballet, London Coliseum

Hanna Weibye Wednesday, 16 April 2014

Before Boris Eifman’s second visit to London this week, ballet lovers who missed the divisive Russian dancemaker last time round will have been weighing up the merits of a punt on a ticket. If they were basing their calculations on reviews, I imagine their mental reasoning went as follows.

Comment

The Rite of Spring & Petrushka, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells

Hanna Weibye Saturday, 12 April 2014

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captures the pulsing terror of seasonal change, the relentless onward drive of nature that brings death closer even as life burns at its most ferocious. The 1913 première of the ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky infamously caused a riot in its Parisian audience. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s version for his company Fabulous Beast has terrifying dog heads and men furiously humping the ground.

The Winter's Tale, Royal Ballet

Hanna Weibye Friday, 11 April 2014

Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on the First World War, though the two evenings succeed and fail in almost equal measure.

tauberbach, les ballets C de la B, Sadler's Wells

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 10 April 2014

Belgian Alain Platel makes the kind of dance theatre (like Pina Bausch, to whom he has an oft-remarked debt) for which both “dance” and “theatre” are very loose and inadequate umbrella terms. “Sets” are often jaw-dropping colonisations of stage space; there are no flats or drops painted to resemble other things, but huge quantities of actual stuff with which the dancers interact.

Lest We Forget, English National Ballet, Barbican

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 03 April 2014

Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through.

Comment

The Prince of the Pagodas, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London Coliseum

Hanna Weibye Thursday, 27 March 2014

When three good choreographers can’t get a ballet right, there must be something wrong with either the story or the music. In the case of the Prince of the Pagodas (a Poirot mystery waiting to be written, that, but I digress), it’s hardly the music: Benjamin Britten’s gamelan-leavened, melodic score, his only for a ballet, is compelling.

Comment

Border Tales, Protein Dance Company, The Place

Sarah Wilkinson Friday, 14 March 2014

Luca Silvestrini paints his contentious look at multiculturalism in Britain in the brash primary colours of stereotyping, allowing little space on the canvas for the light and shade of personal insight.

Trasmín/Gala Flamenca, Sadler's Wells

Hanna Weibye Wednesday, 12 March 2014

In Trasmín, the curtain rises on two bodies leaning apart, yet reaching back to face one other, each columnar figure a twisted into a perfect spiral line from knees to the tips of curved fingers. Their feet are concealed by the great fabric swathes (for which “frills” is much too flimsy a label) of their traditional bata de cola dresses: rising from those grey cascades they look like two rococo sculptures in a fountain.

BBC Ballet Season

Hanna Weibye Monday, 10 March 2014

There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.