dance
The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 25 May 2010![]()
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her company went into something of a creative abeyance to focus on producing a new dance community centre, this was one of Davies’s... Read more... |
BABEL (words), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 18 May 2010![]()
Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Read more... |
Wayne McGregor & Alexei Ratmansky premieres, New York City BalletSunday, 16 May 2010![]()
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed architect Santiago Calatrava. Read more... |
Mathilde Monnier and La Ribot, Queen Elizabeth HallSunday, 09 May 2010![]() These past five days in May have seen some fairly oddball goings-on labelled as "New Dance at the Southbank Centre". Accidentally coinciding with other oddball goings-on on the national scene, since it was booked up long ago before elections were called. But no double-act in politics is likely to be quite as peculiar and weirdly stimulating as that between the Spanish cabaret artiste La Ribot (often to be found nude) and the postmodern French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, playing two sides of... Read more... |
Electric Counterpoint/ Asphodel Meadows/ Carmen, Royal BalletWednesday, 05 May 2010![]()
Wonder of wonders - a really cracking triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night. The best of the year, by a country mile, and probably the best for several years: a top-notch beauty from Christopher Wheeldon, the love-it-or-loathe-it Marmite of Mats Ek’s Carmen, and in between a comely and reverberant new ballet from a very young Royal Ballet choreographer who looks set to go places. Read more... |
Les 7 Doigts, Peacock Theatre/ Cie Deborah Colker, touringMonday, 03 May 2010![]()
As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two... Read more... |
Gnosis, Akram Khan, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 27 April 2010![]()
Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, or recognition. Surely Akram Khan has some unusual intuition about what it means to die, since his latest creation is truly a dance of death and the gods certainly seem to have been bent on preventing it. Read more... |
Pictures from an Exhibition, Sadler's WellsSunday, 25 April 2010![]()
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck. Read more... |
La Fille Mal Gardée, Royal BalletWednesday, 21 April 2010![]()
If you're going to dance before the future King of England, and your company bears his family's crest, you'd better dance well. Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London ColiseumTuesday, 20 April 2010![]()
Good dancing - never mind great dancing - calls for an investment of imagination in every point of the foot, every raise of the arm. Why otherwise do the constant drill of turning out the leg, stretching the instep, taking fifth position, if the performer does not find something to stimulate them to make it personal, to dream it, to claim it for their own nuance? Does the violinist play Schubert thinking that it is enough just to get the notes right? Read more... |
Pages
latest in today

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the...

The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at...

I saw the Miki Berenyi Trio play a warmly received sold out set at the Lexington last autumn, at which many of the songs now coming out on ...

It’s a greater accolade than a Nobel Prize for Literature – one’s very own adjective. There’s a select few: Shakespearean;...

Pigsx7 have hardly got a reputation for penning tender and soulful ballads, but Death Hilarious is a particularly aggressive and...

That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of...

“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's...

It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this,...
Motherhood is a high stress job. Ask any woman and they will tell you the same: sleepless nights, feeding problems and worry. Lots of worry. Lots...