Royal Ballet
Hanna Weibye
In a moment of wild fantasy, I thought I might try and write a whole review of Manon without mentioning sex. After all, there’s plenty of other stuff going on in Kenneth MacMillan’s tale, which last night at the Royal Opera House celebrated 40 years since its première. Inequalities of class, wealth and power are ever present, and in fact drive the story to its sticky (quite literally) conclusion in the Louisiana swamps. It's not precisely her screwing around that lands Manon on a one-way penal transport to the colonies, but her (and her brother’s) screwing over of a rich man.But who was Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.So you need two good principals for a really perfect Dream – ideally with more than a hint of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Some artists acquire (or create) cults of personality because – Byron, Wagner or Van Gogh – they are just so obviously fruity. Some others, though less fruity, are venerated because their work is so tear-prickingly astonishing that we are desperate to get closer to its source. Shakespeare is one such; George Balanchine, the twentieth-century Russian-American choreographer, is another. Serenade (1934), the first piece he made in America, is a thing of wonder. Ever argued with a music-lover who thought most scores would be better without dance’s cheap, distracting visuals? Show ‘em this, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night the Olivier Awards handed their top honour for dance not to a dancer but to the man who shines the lights on the dancers. Michael Hulls, winner of the Outstanding Achievement in Dance award, paints the dancing of Sylvie Guillem, Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant and the Ballet Boyz with atmospheres and illuminations that seem to reach beyond the visual and into some paranormal place.Lighting designers are either wizards or useful pedants. They scrupulously light the action or they make light speak its own language, activating space, time, illusion, imagination - inventing effects that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on the First World War, though the two evenings succeed and fail in almost equal measure. But that’s what you get for tackling Shakespeare, as well as for being the overdog: in a way, it is testament to the Royal Ballet’s tremendous track record with story ballets that we all go into a new one believing (or at least hoping) that we are about to be given Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.Last Saturday, the season opener, Darcey’s Ballerina Heroines (BBC 2), set the tone by getting the predictable Fonteyn panegyric in early, and by giving Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Do four programmes constitute a season? Let's not quibble too much; though brief, the ballet season airing on BBC2 and BBC4 this week has some appealing offerings. Judging from the strong focus on famous names (Fonteyn, Bussell) and the best known Tchaikovsky ballets, the Beeb is aiming at a broad general audience, but balletomanes will be happy to see several eminent dancers crop up as talking heads, as well as lots of lovely footage of both contemporary and historic performances.Reflecting perhaps a new confidence in the marketability of ballet, the season gets a primetime kickoff Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Clement Crisp, veteran ballet critic, once expressed his appreciation for Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet by saying that “if one had to throw ballets off the back of a sleigh, this would be the last to go.” Charming though the train of thought was that this metaphorical situation provoked (an insomniac ballet critic could muse on it for several nights), it can’t accommodate The Sleeping Beauty, which is to other ballets like the QE2 to Crisp’s sleigh. This behemoth is not going to be thrown anywhere.It’s not that I don’t like Sleeping Beauty; au contraire, I love it (thanks in no small part to that 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 ...
Hanna Weibye
"Be careful what you wish for," fairy tales teach us. After I wished in December for more bite in Scottish Ballet’s saccharine Hansel and Gretel, along comes this revival of Liam Scarlett’s 2013 version of the same story for the Royal Ballet. Depicting as it does child neglect, domestic violence, paedophilia, murder, psychosis and suicide, Scarlett’s Hansel and Gretel has bite all right.Dark is an understatement here, in the black cavernous underground space of the Linbury Studio Theatre. Jon Bausor’s highly effective set bisects the stalls, bringing the audience right into Hansel and Gretel’ Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Ah, Giselle. Despite being cobbled together from a huge stack of 19th-century literary and dramatic tropes – fans of La Sylphide, Robert le Diable, Lucia di Lammermoor, Walter Scott and German Romanticism will feel right at home – and having a score from Adolphe Adam that is definitely not in the first league of ballet music, Giselle is endlessly compelling: the ballet sticks in your mind. The miraculously-intact 19th-century choreography of the second act is part of the attraction, but so is the character of Giselle, the peasant girl who, seduced and betrayed by a nobleman in disguise, kills Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...