Dance
Ismene Brown
It was one of the better Olympic culture ideas that Wales, Scotland and England should combine in a Dance GB night, with the three “national” dance companies all creating something new. But a risk that had little Wales holding its breath in fear, up against the might of English National Ballet and Scottish Ballet. And who would have expected the 12-strong National Dance Company Wales to emerge as unexpected heroes?Truly this wee troupe stepped up to the plate, nabbing the world-famous Christopher Bruce for their choreographer, and being rewarded with the audience hit of the night of a rather Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The curtain rises onto a wall that totally blocks the view. A long silence... then, without warning, the wall collapses – to cheers of delight from the audience. For the rest of the evening, the dancers have to pick their way over rubble strewn across the middle ground that restricts free movement to strips of open space at the front and rear of the stage. It's a powerful metaphor for a society constrained by its past as well as its present; and Sicily is littered with the remains of civilisations that have disappeared leaving behind buildings stricken by earthquakes, swallowed by lava Read more ...
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 ...
james.woodall
It opens with a siren saying she’s got cramp. She’s glad she’s got cramp because she can stay outside and enjoy the sky. It closes with people blowing water at each other, glugged from plastic bottles. In between nothing happens.Well, that’s not quite true. One woman strokes her beautiful brown legs with a brush. Another lies down and says - as, so often in Bausch, in irritating English - “Don’t pass the line” (actually it should be “cross”). Two men chuck a spear between them. The cast loll around in beach gear with cocktail languor. There are dozens of other moments of utter Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. David Bintley came out much the better of a last-minute squabble a fortnight ago about his new ballet’s name - he had to truncate it to Faster, from his original “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, so that LOCOG could keep Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new Sleeping Beauty from the iconoclastic dance showman Matthew Bourne headlines Sadler's Wells Theatre's new season. Climaxing a year of celebrating Bourne's engaging talent - his Play Without Words plays the Wells' summer, following a tour of early career highlights - this production offers a grown-up alternative to the record-breaking Christmas show The Snowman at the Peacock Theatre once again for the 15th year. San Francisco Ballet's visit in September with a generous season is another news-maker, and there's a return for Akram Khan's superb DESH, whose second run was postponed after Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...
Ismene Brown
John Percival, one of the heavyweight group of dance critics of the past 60 years, died last Wednesday, aged 85. He had watched and reported on ballet and dance from their infancy in the Forties right up to recent years, offering a powerful perspective on one of the most vivid and energetic movements in British culture in the 20th century.The first biographer of Rudolf Nureyev and choreographer John Cranko, Percival was for 30 years the dance critic of The Times and also the editor of Dance and Dancers, the now defunct but eminent monthly magazine that charted the growing maturity of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery. All of which should make Nefés, Pina Bausch’s travelogue on Istanbul, one of the more substantial productions of her long series Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. The first half unfolds against a backdrop of white muslin curtains rippling in the wind; the long hair and flowing dresses of the dancers are similarly activated by this elemental force, whose energy creates an ongoing sense of excitement and expectation (even though we know the air currents are generated by a wind machine).Later the curtains become a screen for footage of palm trees and dense forest; for scenes from the Read more ...