Royal Ballet
judith.flanders
Christmas rolls around, and so does Cinderella, a welcome alternative to the seasonal dance-critic bah-humbug that is The Nutcracker. First, the good news. The good news is Marianela Nuñez. Always a lovely dancer, in Ashton she just glows. No one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s fiendishly difficult petite batterie, those tiny, beaten, viciously fast steps; no one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s light, bright jumps: with her sunny temperament and lovely punchy ballon Nuñez rises (literally) to the choreography’s demands.She is not an effortless dancer, not one of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia. Last night, given the bumbling performance by the Royal Ballet after a few years’ absence, it came over even more as a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in her 90th year. Even more of a stunner to see Alonso herself sitting in the Royal Box, and coming on stage at the end to a standing ovation, tiny, chalk-white, red-lipped, with black glasses over her blind eyes, giving a remarkably deep curtsey for someone of 89.Actually, for a nonagenarian to take such a long flight from Cuba just to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.Shakespeare’s play was premiered in 1596 - not until 1776 did the first opera on it emerge, Romeo und Julie by Georg Benda, a near-contemporary of Haydn and Kapelmeister to the Duke of Gotha who Read more ...
Ismene Brown
One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg in the central roles last night for the Royal Ballet's opening salvo of the season, there wasn’t a hair's-breadth spare in the house, every place gone, even the standing ones in the gods where you can only see a sliver of the stage.Lucky audience to see this stellar pair of dance-actors attempting with all their Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the first of a short summer series in which artists and performers tell theartsdesk about what they're reading, ballerina Tamara Rojo talks about the books she's taken with her on holiday, and what she's enjoyed reading. We run short extracts from two of them.Born in Canada of Spanish parents in 1975, Rojo came to the UK to join Scottish Ballet briefly, before becoming English National Ballet's star in the late 1990s. She joined the Royal Ballet in 2000, and since then has become a global star, as famous for her intelligence as for her supreme technical virtuosity and powers as a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds some dancers, finds some music, finds some moves, finds some light and atmosphere - and this agglomeration of variables goes out on stage all too often to fall flat, a soufflé that didn't rise. It was insufficiently skilled, or its ingredients were stale, or it lacked the leavening of a compelling imagination or the flavour of real emotional Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual tradition that is the Royal Ballet School Matinee at Covent Garden isn’t just some prestige indulgence for the nervous parents of ballet children fortunate enough to survive the militaristic training and dogged enough to want to continue into the beckoning career where there are such frail job prospects. It is a place where the gap between a good student and a potential artist comes clear through the sheer size and one-offness of the occasion.That’s a big stage to conquer, a stage of dreams and fame, where Fonteyn and Seymour danced, where Guillem and Bussell and Dowell lit fires Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two leading ballerinas retired this week on either side of the Atlantic, Darci Kistler of New York City Ballet and Miyako Yoshida of the Royal Ballet. Both are in their mid-forties (not old for a ballerina) and each is an exemplar of certain best qualities of their companies, yet each seems to have outstayed their welcome in some way. Each farewell lights the touchpaper of argument as to whether those best qualities are institutional or personal - and therefore whether they can be preserved and transmitted - or whether the image that ballet neurotically clings to, of being ever-modernising, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new male star will be leading the Royal Ballet next season - a prodigious in-house talent of just 20. Sergei Polunin, Ukrainian-born and Royal Ballet School-trained, has been elevated to top rank in the Royal Ballet’s end-of-year promotions after just two years in the company. His rapid ascent to the top has not been unexpected as he has been constantly marked out with warm reviews for his combination of aristocratic style and darkly dramatic aura.The other new male principal next season is to be Nehemiah Kish, 27, an American-born principal with both the Royal Danish and National Canadian Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ninette de Valois said the solution to a shortage of choreographic talent was this: “You wait.” Waiting through the Nineties and early Noughties proved the Royal Ballet founder’s point - suddenly new distinctive ballet talent is cropping up all over the place. Taking the pressure off Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, young Liam Scarlett showed his confident colours this spring, and now, segueing on from his distinctive performing career at Covent Garden, here is Viacheslav Samodurov, the undoubted star of the Royal Ballet’s New Works programme in the Linbury Studio last night.This Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time, not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country - jazz, music hall, Broadway, Cubism, Russian imperialism, folklore, classical piano studies, all soaked his personality and fed his imagination. It is a range of experience that both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon have grown up without and it made the last of the Royal Ballet’s triple bills a faintly poignant affair. If McGregor and Read more ...