ballerina
Ismene Brown
What's the preferred scoff of Moulin Rouge can-can dancers? We found out, rather accidentally, last night, if you watched the final of Celebrity Masterchef. And if the world's dancers don't beat down the doors of Paris to get in, I'll eat my chat.The three celebrity finalists (celebrities, pay attention) - actress Lisa Faulkner (Holby City, Spooks, Burn It), TV presenter Dick Strawbridge (Scrapheap Challenge) and political-scandal wife Christine Hamilton - have a final week cooking ridiculous challenges in increasingly surreal circumstances. Last night’s final-part-1 consisted of cooking Read more ...
Ismene Brown
After all the encomia for Natalia Osipova it’s time for a paean to another Bolshoi ballerina, whose witty underplaying and conquest of style makes her the lady I’d choose to see shipwrecked in full tutu, diamonds and pink satin pointe shoes on any desert island I fetched up on. Maria Alexandrova starred in two 19th-century restorations of palatial opulence - the pirate party Le Corsaire and the princess party Paquita. Mistress of balletic patisserie, she decorates these glorious old wedding cakes of choreography with delectable sugar rosettes in her footwork, leaps of lightest meringue, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’re getting used to expecting the extraordinary from Natalia Osipova - and then getting some more. With her impish face and farouche capriciousness, with a spring like a high-jumper and shoulders like a swimmer, she is without doubt the most explosively delightful comedienne and virtuoso around at the Bolshoi, but could she be a Giselle? A weak-hearted innocent, a sorrowing ghost, an angel of pleading mercy? Doubt it not. Last night Osipova proved her versatility breathtakingly, weaving the supernatural magic of Giselle in a wholly individual way, defying her own image, and she was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How does a ballerina feel during Swan Lake? Find out instantaneously from the New York ballerina who tweets while she dances. Ashley Bouder is one of the most exciting dancers of the new generation over there - and new-generation she is.According to Gia Kourlas’s article in the New York Times today, Ashley’s iPhone is her closest partner, and her constant twittering is opening up a new understanding of a leading dance-artist’s life. So what did the Swan Queen tweet the other day as she magically flew off the stage and prepared to change into the black tutu of her wicked doppelganger? “Odette Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You don’t usually find ballerinas in Monument Valley. Cowboys, maybe, but not a pale, slender girl in a glistening golden tutu alighting like an exotic butterfly briefly on a silk-shod toe in the very same red dust that John Wayne rattled across in Stagecoach. The cover pictures for the Royal Opera House season brochures have fielded some spectacular pictures, but the new spring image is symbolic of the enduring nature of the dancer's will to survive. Sarah Lamb, the translucent blonde from the US, is back on pointe after a year when her career appeared to be over.Breaking her foot in a Manon Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There were some odd sights in Christmas Day viewing but none more discomfiting, I’d bet, than seeing a ballerina lying on a physio’s couch having a leg dragged quickly up to touch the side of her head while the other leg lay perfectly still pointing downwards. Can the body really do that? Another weird sight - dozens of people in full 18th-century French costume and wigs dancing in 40-degree heat on a Cuban stage. Meanwhile coachloads of dancers were going down with swine flu and a 45-year-old retired dancer was flown in from Germany to take the part of a 20-year-old. Surely nothing is as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.After that things got considerably more complicated, and far more enjoyable. Following the disaster that was Gracie! last week, I fully expected Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Critics did not cover themselves with glory after the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty in St Petersburg on a snowy January night in 1890: “We cannot help regretting the means chosen by the theatre directorate in lowering the standard of artistry of our ballet,” wrote one. Another: “Such spectacles attract neither a constant public nor a circle of educated adherents.”Indeed, time and place change everything. More than a century later few ballets have a more constant public than Sleeping Beauty and none a more educated circle of adherents - it’s the ultimate theatre ballet, a manifestation of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Johan Persson took photographs of Kim Brandstrup's new ballet with Tamara Rojo, Goldberg, which was premiered at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, on 21 September 2009. Music is J S Bach's Goldberg Variations, designs Richard Hudson, lighting Paule Constable, video Leo Warner for Fifty Nine Productions Ltd, sound Ian Dearden. Performed by Tamara Rojo, Tom Whitehead, Steven McRae, Clara Barbera, Laura Caldow, Tommy Franzén, Riccardo Meneghini. Pianists Philip Gammon and Henry Roche. Read Ismene Brown's review.Click on a picture to enter full view and slideshow. [bg|/johanpersson/ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At last a seriously good new ballet created not just inside the Royal Opera House’s bunker-like Linbury Studio Theatre but actually making complete sense of its space and atmosphere. Kim Brandstrup’s new creation with the Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo, Goldberg, is a beautiful, grown-up piece of fine musical feeling and drama, and with a design and lighting scheme to die for.They came from left-field on this one, since to get anything made new at the Royal Ballet is generally a torturous business of compromise with time, cast and concept. But Rojo swung her weight about as ballerina and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet's leading ballerina Tamara Rojo was holding a large and not old but already battered diary when we met, pages and dried flowers falling out of it, along with notes and photographs. It’s barely a book, more a pile of loose papers, but it is the 10-year diary with which this extraordinary performer, still only 35, intends to see out her dancing career, and move on to her next.She will spend next week nightly on stage at the Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in a new ballet created for her at the Royal Ballet by Kim Brandstrup, set to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It will Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The phenomenal French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (b. 1965) has always been a modern woman, for all her classical ballerina dress. She joined the Royal Ballet in 1989 from Nureyev's Paris Opera Ballet, on terms of strictest independence, hardly saying a word to the press, while her image as a brilliant but truculent "Mademoiselle Non" grew and grew. The image belies the person, though - once you meet her, what’s striking is her lack of side, unblinkered intelligence and polite but firm candour.This first of four interviews dates from December 1995 when the world’s most imitated classical Read more ...