dance
Birthday Offering/ A Month in the Country/ Les Noces, Royal BalletMonday, 02 July 2012
A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must always be a tricky one, but true to form the mistress of the great occasion (anniversaries have been a mainstay of her programming) picked rituals and ceremonies that stressed company ethos and values. Read more...
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The Grand Tour/ Faster/ The Dream, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeThursday, 28 June 2012
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. Read more... |
Nefés, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsMonday, 25 June 2012
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery. Read more... |
Bamboo Blues, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 23 June 2012
Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. Read more... |
Der Fensterputzer, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler’s WellsTuesday, 19 June 2012
It may be that designer Peter Pabst is the unsung hero of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s “World Cities” extravaganza. When the lights go down at Sadler’s Wells for Der Fensterputzer (The Window-washer), the stage is dominated by a vast mountain of glowing red flowers, over four metres high, nine metres across, looming out of a modernistic black-box stage. It is a moment of pure, surging drama. Read more... |
Ten Chi, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreMonday, 18 June 2012
The Japanese dance public is overwhelmingly female, so it’s not surprising that Pina Bausch’s paean to Saitama, Ten Chi, is so girly. Read more... |
South Bank Show: The Male Dancer, Sky Arts 1Monday, 18 June 2012
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta. Read more... |
...Como El Musguito..., Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 13 June 2012
If you are tired of life, tired of London, or even tired of love, muster the remaining fibres of your frazzled being and do whatever it takes to get tickets for ...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si... or any of the other performances in the Pina Bausch "World Cities" retrospective on at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican over the next four weeks. Read more... |
Nur Du, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreMonday, 11 June 2012
Many people will be having their first taste of the late Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre in this copious London retrospective of 10 of her “World City” productions; others will have bought into several of the series, possibly by now wondering how many hours they can take of her barbed view of men and women. For all of us, reading programme notes is beside the point; the background you need is what’s inside you, your memories, your songs, your susceptibilities. Read more... |
Viktor, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsThursday, 07 June 2012
It stymies any tourist to sum up for others what they saw abroad. Still more challenging, to create (or recreate) for theatre as a choreographer something more than superficial, more than clichéd about Italy, Japan, Los Angeles, Istanbul, these most clichéd of cultures. Read more... |
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