Kenneth MacMillan
Hanna Weibye
The reception of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Anastasia has some similarities with that accorded the Berlin asylum patient who some believed to be the lost Romanov Grand Duchess. For supporters who wanted to believe in the fairytale, Anna Anderson's awkwardness, her lack of Russian, her facial dissimilarity to the Tsar's youngest daughter, could all be turned to postive account; her unlikeness became evidence of likeness.In the case of the ballet, its supporters cite its flaws as evidence of its nobility; MacMillan should not be accused of failing, but lauded for having tried at all. The ballet Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This is it. This is absolutely, definitely, finally Carlos Acosta's farewell to classical ballet. He has managed to spin out his retirement celebrations for almost a year: he gave his last performance on the Royal Opera House main stage last November, and there have already been two versions of the gala show which opened at the Royal Albert Hall last night, one at the Coliseum last autumn and a touring one during the spring and early summer of this year. But this – we believe – really is the last chance to see Acosta on stage in classical roles.It's some way to go out. The previous version of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday. The Invitation should be – and is – a shocking piece, but when bracketed by Wayne McGregor's brand new Obsidian Tear and Christopher Wheeldon's 2012 Within the Golden Hour, two particularly vapid examples of contemporary ballet, MacMillan's ballet de moeurs, for all its darkness, has a comforting solidity. It reassures us that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Last night at the Royal Ballet was, emphatically, laser-free. The combination of Afternoon of a Faun (1953) and In the Night (1970) by the great American choreographer Jerome Robbins, with a repeat of Kenneth MacMillan's 1965 Song of the Earth, performed earlier this season in a different triple bill, is your archetypical safe bet, presumably calculated to soothe any ruffles that might have been caused by Wayne McGregor's ambitious Virginia Woolf opus. The Royal Ballet ought to have been able to do these mid-century classics standing on its collective head.They did start off well. Afternoon Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the second piece of last night's triple bill, Hofesh Shechter's Untouchable in its world premiere, my friend asked me why it had been put on the programme with the first piece, George Balanchines 1946 Four Temperaments. He wondered if there was some structural or thematic connection that he had missed between the two wildly different pieces. The Balanchine speaks obviously to the bill's last item, Kenneth MacMillan's 1966 Song of the Earth; both pair a cool neoclassical choreographic idiom with deeply felt but vaguely expressed melancholy. But the best I reason I can imagine for the new Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Is it odd that, in a bill containing an achingly contemporary première and a classic meditation on the First World War, a pastel-painted present for the Queen Mother’s birthday should race away with the honours?Not if it was by Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer. He’s been rather an undersung genius since his death, but maybe last night will tip the balance towards him again in the capacity crowd stakes, for his plotless Rhapsody (1980) was the standout piece in the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill. Much of the credit goes to Steven McRae, who danced his heart Read more ...
judith.flanders
My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish.Benjamin (pictured below right) has had a longer career than most. She is, unbelievably, 49, although you would probably have to see the picture in her attic to prove Read more ...
natalie.wheen
If you look at a map of Russia, you will find the city of Perm just west of the spine of the Ural Mountains which divides European Russia from Asia, about 720 miles north-east of Moscow. Just under two hours away by plane, you only understand the reality of its remoteness going there by Russian train: 24 hours’ slow chug through endless forests of silver birch, pines and bog, only occasionally enlivened by the startling yellow of kingcups. You feel yourself being translated into a different dimension.In Russian cultural memory, it’s a symbolic place: the faraway country, northern, pagan, a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over the decades, some home-reared, others drawn from abroad like moths to flames by the chance to dance ballets where no archetypes can be found, only real people in situations of such prescribed individuality that the performers themselves can become their most individual.There isn’t a more demanding role than Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, a ballet Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Quite simply, the performance was one of those rarest of events in the theatre that will be talked about for generations - the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, with the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin making his debut as Crown Prince Rudolf.This has been a "must-see" evening since the minute it was announced by Moscow's Stanislavsky Ballet not only with Polunin now having rock-star status in Russia, but also for MacMillan’s choreography which is not found in any other Russian theatre. Extra chairs were put in, people were even sitting in the aisles. The full run Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a reputation as the prince of unflinching emotional catharsis, Kenneth MacMillan emerged from the Royal Ballet’s triple bill marking the 20th anniversary of his death as a lord of lyricism. The new bill presents MacMillan three ways, his academic instincts, intellectual imagination and emotional vision - a bold versatility you (whisper it) almost never see from today's choreographers. And it was a surprise that the most heart-felt performance came in the elegiac melancholy of his ballet Requiem, commemorating his own death quite as evocatively as it must have originally lamented that of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement Read more ...