Dance
Ismene Brown
Who would imagine that the search for new dance audiences would result in a cascade of fairy tales and dramas at Sadler's Wells, the focus for hip eyes on culture? But it is so - The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale all appear this year (following dear old Nutcracker over the Christmas period), though in radical new versions. Matthew Bourne has been commissioned to produce a new Sleeping Beauty for winter 2012, in the line of his previous classic rewrites Swan Lake, Cinderella and Nutcracker!. The Pet Shop Boys/Javier de Frutos creation based on Andersen's Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche appear live on stage and theatre giants Pina Bausch, Philip Glass and Shakespeare are celebrated in a season of prominent internationalism. Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Yukio Ninagawa, Krzysztof Penderecki and Chick Corea are among many other world names invited to EC2 over the season. Three key British theatre companies are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Craig Hassall, English National Ballet’s managing director, apologised ironically at theartsdesk’s Dance Question Time in November for putting on popular work at ENB, meaning Strictly Gershwin, a song-and-dance entertainment to follow the music-and-dance entertainment that is The Nutcracker.My colleague Judith Flanders has already reported on her feelings about this production with unimprovable acerbity, and I’m there with her, wondering what the dancers of ENB did to deserve such pale fare as this. On the other hand, shows are not conceived with dancers in mind but with box office, and box Read more ...
judith.flanders
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)By contrast, the Wellcome’s show of ex-voto panels from Mexico (main picture, above), the small thanks-offerings painted to record miraculous intercessions from the saints in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Recent events hint, somewhat unexpectedly, that political change in the country is in the air; at the least what had seemed a depressingly predictable certainty before December’s elections now at least now looks up for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible.An incredible cornucopia of ballerina artistry showed that the interpretation of existing work is just as necessary to the soul as the surprise of new creation. Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy. It's a show of mime, clowning and coups de théâtre, stunningly conceived on the twin themes of snow and the gruelling Russian winters outdoors, where street cleaners live out their lives, vagrants of an outcast kind of peculiarity and optimistic imagination, where brooms and bins are constants in their lives, where Read more ...
theartsdesk
Competition alert! Start 2012 with a surprise arts trip. On theartsdesk we love crossing the borders - "Surprise me," was the edict of the great impresario of theatre, music, art and dance, Serge Diaghilev, and it's one we hold to here, because we believe in the pleasure of surprises. So please enter our competition, and a pair of tickets to one of the splendid events listed below could be coming your way, but you will take pot luck with which one you win, and who knows? You could discover a new passion.We will email winners on Sunday 1 January - New Year's Day - with details of how they Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It would always be a risk putting such a gossamer Christmas charmer as The Nutcracker into a gargantuan Mammonite cavern like the O2 Arena, where magic only counts if it rings loudly in the coffers - car park £25! programmes £10! As with the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet last June, Birmingham Royal Ballet have put up a cinema screen to enable thousands of viewers far away to catch what looks dolls-house-sized in real view. But where that other ballet is all about action and plot, this is a ballet about atmospheres and dreams, needing most delicate weaving into its setting.If you sit in a £ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You're going to test your stomach and sweet temper to the maximum today - test your brain and memory too with our monster quiz about the arts covered by theartsdesk in 2011. Every artform is represented here in 12 dozen questions. Settle down between courses, films and presents and see how many you and your near and dear can do.There's a linkable clue to each question where you will find an article that furnishes the answer. All the answers are on another page here - which will become live at noon today to give you a start.In film, what is “the Great Whatsit?” ClueWhich shuttered cultural Read more ...
theartsdesk
Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.A suitcase bomb in Kiss Me DeadlyThe Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, which reopened its main theatre in October, having lost its ballet director Gennady Yanin to scandal and its stars Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev to the Mikhailovsky Ballet"Everyday"29205Noel GallagherPhyllida Lloyd1980 Read more ...
theartsdesk
Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.As well as posting our usual range of reviews (coming up in the next couple of days, some terrific writing on theatre, film and television), we also have a selection of seasonal treats. On Christmas Day we are publishing a bumper arts quiz specifically tailored for readers of theartsdesk, who know their cultural onions. (Sample questions: "In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy what type of mint Read more ...