Baryshnikov
Tom Birchenough
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.Mokhnenko’s charisma is at the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It would spoil the surprise to say what exactly emerges when – after a breathless build-up and a few glimpses of a seductive silhouette – the living doll Olympia finally makes her entrance in Act One of English Touring Opera’s new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Let’s just say that it’s startling, beautiful, strange and ever-so-slightly spooky. In a word: uncanny. In an even better word: Hoffmannesque. The audience gasped, and James Bonas’s production found its stride.The Tales of Hoffmann(*****) is the centrepiece (with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Massenet’s Werther) Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sunday evening may have been all about melancholy at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, but last night Bjarte Eike and his uproariously talented Barokksolistene traded wails for ales and one of their legendary alehouse sessions at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. There was music, certainly, but also dancing, storytelling, drinking (yes, really) and more joy than it’s possible to imagine from this tight-knit bunch of musical mavericks.Remember the childhood delight of forming a band and spending hours in your parents’ garage, basement or attic practising? Violinist Eike and his ensemble have Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta.But this was not a historical survey of attitudes to male dancers and how Oliver Cromwell messed with British heads - that interesting possibility remains unrealised on TV. This was about the act of fleeing slavery to find freedom, from constricted motherland to liberated Western Read more ...
judith.flanders
For those in the know, Sergei Polunin has been marked out as “the one to watch” from his schooldays. Since he won the Prix de Lausanne in 2006 and joined the Royal Ballet the following year, he has been “the next big thing”. Well, I’m here to tell you, after last night’s performance of Rhapsody, he is not the next big thing. He is the big thing now.He gave the performance of a lifetime, and, even more astonishingly, looked so comfortable that it is perfectly clear that, at only 21, he has a dance-lifetime of such performances well within his grasp.I know, I know, I sound like a teenager in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist defections. Victor (who is a very engaging raconteur) reveals the lengths the Russians tried to go to stop Pierre Boulez conducting Berg in the USSR - liver-busting ceremonial vodka sessions, and a solution of Lewis Carrollian ludicrousness. "I hated them," he says, "but we needed each other."Following on from last week's revelations about their Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Tuesday Mikhail Baryshnikov, just turned 62, will dance again, an evergreen superstar as well as philanthropist. The occasion will be the opening of the Jerome Robbins Theater, his latest project in his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. In this second collection of conversations with him - read part 1 here - edited from interview transcripts from 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2004, Baryshnikov talks about his devotion to George Balanchine, global celebrity with ABT and beyond, and the voyage he took into modern dance, using his fame and fortune (and TV's Sex and the City) to give back as much as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) marked his 62nd birthday last Wednesday. Even more than Nureyev, Baryshnikov entered the popular mind as something more than a matchless ballet dancer. With his popstar looks and magnetic attraction for women, he has been embraced the world over as a cultural icon of his era, a symbol of political freedom, a Soviet paragon turned go-getting American capitalist, an Oscar-nominated film star and a Tony-nominated stage actor, as well as an irresistible, airborne fantasy lover. In ballet Baryshnikov is the lodestar of male dancing, his videos and Read more ...