dance
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells review - exhilarating display of a full deck of dance stylesSaturday, 09 September 2023
A big welcome awaited the Alvin Ailey dancers at the Wells, on their first international tour since lockdown. The company has scheduled four different mixed bills over 10 days, each with its signature piece, Revelations, as the finale. This is a great idea as the company returned after their final bow on press night to reprise part of the piece and coax the audience onto their feet. No problem. Read more... |
Matthew Bourne's Romeo + Juliet, Sadler's Wells review - exhilarating dancing, inventive movesMonday, 07 August 2023
Matthew Bourne regularly revamps the first version of a new piece so that by the second go-round it really zings. For the return of his 2019 Romeo + Juliet, though, very little has changed, yet it feels refreshed. Read more... |
Jewels, The Australian Ballet, Royal Opera House review - a sparkling parade of great dancingFriday, 04 August 2023
Every time you see Jewels, George Balanchine’s masterpiece from 1967, something new emerges from its treasure trove. What the Australian Ballet pleasurably bring to the fore is its playful, and play-acting, side. Read more... |
Carlos at 50, Royal Opera House review - lovingly designed gala from a still impressive starThursday, 27 July 2023
On the day Mick Jagger turned 80, that spring chicken Carlos Acosta, 50 this year, returned to the stage of the Royal Opera House, which he had left in 2015 after 17 years. Carlos at 50 was a wonderfully sunny, warm embrace of a return: the audience greeted his first appearance ecstatically, and his wide grin reflected how happy he was to be there too. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival - invisible cities and possible dreamsMonday, 17 July 2023
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival. Read more... |
Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, Sadler's Wells - a roaring start to the Flamenco FestivalSaturday, 08 July 2023
When flamenco first came out of the shadows and started to fill big theatres, it was like something out of a historical pageant. The shows that played London in the early 1990s harked back to an imagined gypsy past where old men hammered rhythms on blacksmiths’ anvils and women swirled extravagant frills. The crudely amplified music lost much of its detail but audiences lapped it up anyway. Read more... |
Untitled, 2023 / Corybantic Games / Anastasia Act III, Royal Ballet review - a magnificent end to the seasonSaturday, 17 June 2023
Is it a cop-out for an artist to label a piece of work “Untitled”? Painters and sculptors make a habit of it, reasoning that they want to leave the viewer free to bring to the experience what they will, unhampered and unlimited by prior information. Odd, then, that dance, being such an ambiguous, free-associating art form, should be so far behind the curve. Read more... |
Requiem, Opera North review - partnership and diversityWednesday, 31 May 2023
Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance. Read more... |
Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1), Sadler's Wells review - an extinction rebellion in danceMonday, 24 April 2023
The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0]. Read more... |
Jungle Book reimagined, Sadler's Wells review - a doomy revision of the Kipling storiesFriday, 07 April 2023
Akram Khan Company promises “a magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic”, and that’s more or less what you get. The choreography is striking and inventive, the dancing and staging superb. Read more... |
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