dance

Rambert: RainForest/ Seven For A Secret/ Elysian Fields, Sadler’s Wells

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Rambert is making a thing of acquiring classic works from the 20th-century contemporary repertory – and a very good thing, too. First staged by them last year, RainForest, a minor Merce Cunningham piece from 1968, was recently performed by the Cunningham company itself, in London on its final tour. And yet, while that performance was straight from the horse’s mouth, I think Rambert (whisper it) in reality do it better.

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Can We Talk About This?, DV8 Physical Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre

Ismene Brown Thursday, 10 November 2011

Some of the bravest people in theatre operate in the dance world. Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 production, Can We Talk About This?, tackles just as contentious and satirically explosive a subject as Javier de Frutos did in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, the luridly anti-Papist work that got him death threats and a BBC ban in 2009.

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Manon, Royal Ballet

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 09 November 2011

Manon is the planet around which a series of moons orbit, locked in place by her gravitational pull. There is Des Grieux, who gives up his seminary studies for nights of pleasure; there is her brother Lescaut, who translates her into cash; and there is Monsieur GM, the aristocrat who wants her body, both to possess it and to display it. They all see her as an object of desire, and their desires set the plot in motion, spinning ultimately to destruction.

The Sleeping Beauty, Royal Ballet

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 01 November 2011

The Sleeping Beauty was the ballet that kissed the then Sadler’s Wells Ballet into stardom in 1946; after a string of poorly conceived Beauty productions, today’s Royal Ballet hurtled back 60 years in 2006 to try to recapture some of that historic Forties magic in its current staging of this most awesome and enchanting of the classical ballets.

Some Like It Hip Hop, ZooNation, Peacock Theatre

Ismene Brown Thursday, 27 October 2011

The title is a warning, as is the cheesy grinning poster - this is going to be Fun with a capital F, and Feel-good too, and Family Friendly. And it is going to clean up hip hop’s badass image. I was already prejudiced against it before I sat down.

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Rian, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Wallets have been emptied by the proliferation of outstanding dance evenings in the past month - Akram Khan’s Desh, Lucinda Childs, the Merce Cunningham farewell - but increase your overdraft, for here is a heart-lifting and ingeniously ingenuous Irish dance night from Michael Keegan-Dolan and Liam Ó Maonlaí that could beat all for pure delight.

La Fille Mal Gardée, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells

Judith Flanders Friday, 21 October 2011

It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.

Richard Alston Dance Company, Focus on Alston, The Place

Ismene Brown Friday, 21 October 2011

Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons and friendly art giants of their generation (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Isamu Noguchi et al).

Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Barbican Theatre

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 19 October 2011

There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist 1979 creation Dance, on this week at the Barbican.

Armitage Gone! Dance, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 12 October 2011

I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone!