Royal Ballet
Ismene Brown
A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must always be a tricky one, but true to form the mistress of the great occasion (anniversaries have been a mainstay of her programming) picked rituals and ceremonies that stressed company ethos and values.Those 10 years of her reign have been steady, stable, conservative - mostly restricted in programming to the box-office comfort zone; and while the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta.But this was not a historical survey of attitudes to male dancers and how Oliver Cromwell messed with British heads - that interesting possibility remains unrealised on TV. This was about the act of fleeing slavery to find freedom, from constricted motherland to liberated Western Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As Mrs Thatcher used to say, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Solutions have been flung with a will at the problem ballet of Kenneth MacMillan’s last years, his orientalist fairytale The Prince of the Pagodas - the Royal Ballet’s retiring director Monica Mason revived it last night as one of her last presentations, determined that a new generation should have the chance to love it.Cut, tightened up, re-edited 10 years after its choreographer’s death (a collaboration between MacMillan’s widow and the Royal Ballet, with the reluctant blessing of the Benjamin Britten Estate), The Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballo della Regina is a strange piece, for many reasons. A piece of minor Balanchine, it was created late in life for a dancer he clearly admired but who was not core to his vision. Strangest of all, he used music by Verdi, a composer whose music he had only choreographed to in his very early days as a journeyman opera-house ballet-master, when he did not get to choose.So what does the piece tell us? Very little, really. Staged by Merrill Ashley, its original lead, it is efficient, neat, well-rehearsed. And I can see no real purpose to it. The curtain rises on a heart-liftingly familiar Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.The all-day event will field a large number of speakers from both the performance and treatment sides. Rojo last week declared after the announcement of her appointment, "I have never been thin and I want for myself and for others to have long Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.The ballerina had made clear in an interview with theartsdesk back in 2009, that her eye was set on a future job as a director when she stopped dancing, and on English National Ballet in particular, the touring company where she first showed herself as a shooting star 15 years ago. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All year we've had to wait for a world premiere, and two come along at once. Last night was built to make some noise about the three most impressive young names in Royal Ballet choreography, and that will be where the PR story ends, but not where the flat disappointment ends. For while Christopher Wheeldon is shown at his magnificent best in an early piece, both Liam Scarlett and Wayne McGregor's new creations are nowhere near the best that either has shown.They're opposites, but alike in why they fail. Scarlett’s Sweet Violets is an impenetrable jangle of narrative in the old style; McGregor Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How many classical ballet dancing jobs, full-time, are there in Great Britain? I make it just 289. That's the Royal Ballet 94, English National Ballet 67, Birmingham Royal Ballet 57, Scottish Ballet 36, Northern Ballet 35. Rambert does sometimes take classically trained dancers: another 23. So, at a stretch, 312 full-time jobs for Britain's classical ballet graduates to be searching for a vacancy in. Moreover, a profession in which most are tenacious of their jobs, staying perhaps 10-plus years.Out of this tiny profession (likely to shrink, with the next stage in the subsidy cuts) only some Read more ...