fri 04/04/2025

dance

The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Pieter Symonds and Jonathan Goddard in 'Rainforest': 'stirring themselves amid the LSD landscape of silver floating pillows'

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 Wells

Ismene Brown

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 Ballet

Roslyn Sulcas

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 Hall

Ismene Brown La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier: can't live with each other, can't live without each other, just like the election

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 Ballet

Ismene Brown

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, touring

Ismene Brown

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 Theatre

Ismene Brown

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 Wells

Ismene Brown

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 Ballet

james Woodall

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 Coliseum

Ismene Brown

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

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

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

It followed some...

MobLand, Paramount+ review - more guns, goons and gangsters...

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...

Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer gene...

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

Album: Miki Berenyi Trio - Tripla

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 ...

The Importance of Being Oscar, Jermyn Street Theatre review...

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

Album: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Death Hilarious

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

Stiletto, Charing Cross Theatre review - new musical excess

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

Misericordia review - mushroom-gathering and murder in rural...

“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...

Owen Wingrave, RNCM, Manchester review - battle of a pacifis...

It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this,...

Apex Predator, Hampstead Theatre review - poor writing turns...

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...