Dance
Ismene Brown
On six more occasions you can have an ideal experience of dance by visiting the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy and then going to see Balanchine’s Jewels at the Opera House. The first part of this trio of abstract ballet gems, Emeralds, evokes the French dancing style of the Paris Opéra where Degas’s deliciously intense dancing girls were employed, and it would do the Royal Ballet troupe good too to be bussed en masse to the RA to absorb the wistfulness of those girls in dawn-pink or sea-blue tutus, endlessly checking their shoes, endlessly waiting, endlessly longing.Last night opened Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s star Robert Parker has been a ballet dancer and a trainee pilot - and is now to become artistic director of Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham, one of the two most important ballet schools in Britain.Known as “nuclear” Robert as a child, the tall, blond dancer has long been the major attraction of BRB for his combination of dynamic dancing and characterful dramatic acting, in an enormous range from classical leads such as Romeo and Prince Siegfried to contemporary ballets by Twyla Tharp and Kim Brandstrup and ballet-drama heros such as King Arthur and Cyrano., two Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To celebrate theartsdesk's second birthday on Friday, we held a panel discussion on The Art of Performance at Kings Place, London, in the Kings Place Festival. Actor Toby Jones, singer-songwriter Mara Carlyle, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and ballerina Bridgett Zehr discussed the challenge of turning work into performance and the moment of offering their artistry to the audience - their goals and inspirations, their best (and worst) performances, and their attitude to critics like us. We filmed the talk live, and below you can watch the event again as it happened, or you can read the Read more ...
ash.smyth
We’ve long grown used to culturally themed opening ceremonies for big sporting events, but when New Zealand and Tonga come together this morning for the first match in the Rugby World Cup 2011, there won’t just be singing and dancing in the pre-match jamboree, but in the actual game as well.Though most major sporting events are subject to (poorly sung) national anthems, rugby – to my knowledge, anyway – is unique in having teams line up to dance. Teams? Yes, indeed: no fewer than four of the top 15 rugby union teams enjoy a bit of a boogie before the starting whistle. New Zealand, of course, Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009, it publishes daily updating reviews, interviews and features by its member writers that aim to combine the best of print journalism standards with the speed, accessibility and technical opportunities of the web.Its particular strengths are overnight reviews of live plays, concerts and dance, in-depth Q&As with leading arts figures, weekly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Edit, edit. Inside TeZukA there’s a charming, elliptical, hugely stylish piece begging to be sliced and trimmed into focus - just as the manga master Osamu Tezuka must have daily occupied himself with as he prepared his graphic cartoons. The visuals in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s piece are spectacular video animations of Tezuka’s fastidiously drawn scenes, the kerpows and the Zen landscapes, Black Jack, the transfigured rabbit. If it does nothing else, this show should whet your appetite for manga.Whether it whets the appetite for what dance can do is a more moot point. At two and a quarter hours Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more sophisticated admiration for the narrative subtlety and precise visions that the best of comics led to. And to Cherkaoui it seemed a compelling world for theatrical treatment.Tezuka (1928-1989) was the most influential cartoonist in Japanese manga, credited with having invented the “big eye” cartooning characteristic in Japan, itself a deliberate take Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On 9 September theartsdesk, Britain's first professional arts journalism site, will be two years old. To celebrate we’re holding a live debate with four leading performers during the Kings Place Festival. An actor, a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist will share their different experiences of performance. Join us, live or online, for a stellar event.Toby Jones actor | Mara Carlyle singer | Mahan Esfahani harpsichordistBridgett Zehr ballerinaLeading performers in different art forms join us for a live debate and lunchtime reception in the Kings Place Festival.Actor Toby Jones, acclaimed Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Shen Wei is only 43, but he’s packed an epic amount into his career. A child sent from home aged nine to study opera; an emigrant to New York; a return to China to choreograph the Beijing Olympics. His urge to put this extraordinary tale into dance theatre is understandable. That Re-Triptych, a semi-biographical creation that’s one of the Edinburgh International Festival’s features in its Asian dance programme this year, is only intermittently intriguing to watch, and largely inchoate in choreography, seems also understandable. Some experiences are just too much to render in art.The format is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bayadere bears on her shoulder a vase of holy water, and the story of the ballet La bayadère is of her refusal to compromise. She could better her life in two political deals: become the high priest’s mistress, or later, when bitten by a poisonous snake, take the antidote and live on while watching her sworn lover marry the princess who he knows tried to murder her. She refuses both. She remains, morally, the vessel of a purity that it would kill her spirit to give up.To stay so true to a principle isn’t only the stuff of fantastical ballet fairy tales. It has to be true of the Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Mariinsky Ballet has just completed a three-week season, with terrific highs (and the odd low). This was the 50th anniversary of the Mariinsky's (then Kirov's) first London visit, in 1961, and it is worth highlighting the role impresarios Victor and Lilian Hochhauser have played in the cultural life of London. They brought the Mariinsky to London in 1961, and, half a century later, they have once more given Londoners a summer of artistic richness, with 10 ballets, six choreographers and numerous casts. We owe a great deal to this extraordinary couple.So, to work.GREATEST THRILL: Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we've a glittering, shimmering ballet score with an aquatic theme, and a brilliant British pianist shows off his compositional skills. Plus, in a week where we all need cheering up, 20th-century music's scariest genius shows that he had a fully developed sense of humour.Other Love Songs: Songs by Brahms and Stephen Hough, The Prince Consort (Linn)Brahms at his most genial is paired with a new song cycle written by polymath British pianist Stephen Hough. He’s a treasure – one of the best virtuoso pianists around, as anyone who’s heard his Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov recordings Read more ...