Dance
Ismene Brown
The celebrated star of the Bolshoi, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, has been told his contracts will not be renewed when they expire at the end of this month - an effective dismissal for Russia's flamboyant and outspoken ballet icon. The dancer is currently embroiled in a vitriolic lawsuit with his Bolshoi bosses over media interviews he has given since the acid attack on the Bolshoi ballet director Sergei Filin, in which he has questioned whether Filin was genuinely injured and has accused the theatre management of manipulating the incident to get rid of Tsiskaridze.He has stated more than once that he 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
So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru have blessed this millennium, both artists who used the lightness of their natural physical abilities to tear into dark emotional places, and who last night tore the Royal Opera House’s sell-out crowd apart. Kobborg the Light-of-foot, Cojocaru the Light-of-heart, dancing away in the blackest, bleakest ballet of all.Mayerling’s demands on the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When the public “got” or did not “get” the original Rite of Spring of Nijinsky and Stravinsky exactly 100 years ago this week, they couldn't call on emotional logic or aesthetic familiarity or symbolic recognition to help. Only imaginative reflex could cause some people to describe in words (the “fearful regrouping of the cells”) or pictures (Valentine Gross’s vivid, instant pencil sketches) what the iconoclastic piece felt like to experience.That, in a sense, holds good for every dance work. Even story-ballets should repel instant verbal description or understanding (or they’d be poetry, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’s new The Great Gatsby. (To say nothing of David Bintley's Aladdin and even less of Peter Schaufuss's Midnight Express.)Nixon is known as a straight narrative man, Marston a more expressionistic type, McGregor all abstract and kinetic, theory. Seeing the three works during the current orbit of Kenneth MacMillan’s eyepopping Mayerling at Covent Read more ...