dance

Swan Lake, English National Ballet, Coliseum

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 23 March 2011

ENB's 'Swan Lake' corps: Photographed by their leading ballerina Daria Klimentová

As everyone who has been watching Agony & Ecstasy: A Year with the English National Ballet on BBC Four now knows, Vadim...

Comment

The Most Incredible Thing, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 23 March 2011

There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing.

Rhapsody/ Sensorium/ 'Still Life' at the Penguin Café, Royal Ballet

Judith Flanders Thursday, 17 March 2011

For those in the know, Sergei Polunin has been marked out as “the one to watch” from his schooldays. Since he won the Prix de Lausanne in 2006 and joined the Royal Ballet the following year, he has been “the next big thing”. Well, I’m here to tell you, after last night’s performance of Rhapsody, he is not the next big thing. He is the big thing now.

Black & White, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Ismene Brown Thursday, 17 March 2011

'Suite en blanc': Astronomically stylish as only French classical ballet can be

At the 11th hour (as we all know from the current telly series), English National Ballet has pulled a gorgeous plum out of its back catalogue that throws open vistas of what a ballet company should be: Serge Lifar’s sumptuous Suite en Blanc. Why this beauty, laced with the hot Spanish deliciousness of Eduard Lalo’s 1881...

Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With the English National Ballet, BBC Four

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 09 March 2011

You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake.

Comment

Cleopatra, Northern Ballet, Leeds Grand Theatre

Ismene Brown Sunday, 06 March 2011

Northern Ballet’s genes are rooted in the Royal Ballet’s narrative golden age of the Sixties, its most significant leader Christopher Gable having been the originally intended Romeo of Kenneth MacMillan’s iconic 1965 Romeo and Juliet.

Comment

The Centaur and the Animal, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 01 March 2011

To achieve a black stage that emits or reflects no light is a hell of an achievement. To place a huge black horse with black rider onto that stage, without the slightest noise, and to contrive a black shadow on the black, is to create an image found in the fathomless wells of subconscious imagery, and the skill of that vision and realisation of it is something I doubt I'm going to forget.

Comment

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet

Ismene Brown Monday, 28 February 2011

Some ballets are drugs in themselves - you’re under their sway no matter what the performance. Other ballets need drugs to help. This new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is definitely of the second kind, a very odd, very shallow, very bright and brilliantly bold staging, that makes no sense, that offers no depth, but which I suspect would be a blast if one were slightly stoned. But to slip a complimentary spliff under the programme's whirligig cover would take it out of the small-...

Comment

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 22 February 2011

An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, ...

Comment

Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Saturday, 19 February 2011

There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.