tue 10/06/2025

choreographers

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican Theatre

Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness...

Read more...

Bern:Ballett, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House

'Clara', choreographed by Cathy Marston

Being a choreographer is harder than it looks. Steps, movement, are just the beginning. On top of that you need to have a sense of theatricality, and then, even more, you need to be able to convey your ideas, through movement alone, to the...

Read more...

The Blue God/ The Firebird, Les Saisons Russes du XXI Siècle, London Coliseum

Ilze Liepa as the goddess in the Lotus Flower entwined with Nikolai Tsiskaridze's Blue God

Anyone who feels, as I do, that the Aesthetic Movement's "cult of beauty" now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum can't compare with the fabulous Ballets Russes exhibition which went before it can dine again on a feast of Russian colour at...

Read more...

Balletboyz, The Talent, Sadler’s Wells

BalletBoyz, in Cemerek's 'Void'

Well, if you’re going to headline yourself in the title of your show "the talent", you’d better have some: audiences aren’t forgiving. William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, ex-Royal Ballet dancers headlining their own company for the last decade, have...

Read more...

Q&A Special: Choreographer Javier de Frutos

Born in Venezuela 48 years ago, de Frutos has never been the fairytale type, at least not overtly. His 20-year career of choreography has been a career of unstoppable fecundity, violent flamboyance, extreme, even grotesque exhibition, outrageous...

Read more...

Q&A Special: The Late Merce Cunningham

Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly...

Read more...

The ROH's Create contract tells the truth about the rights grab

After Monday's report on the Royal Opera House’s new contract demands, a young composer alerted theartsdesk to an intriguing offer on the Covent Garden website - to "Create" a soundtrack for dance. This is a competition for new talent which will be...

Read more...

Q&A Special: Choreographer Slava Samodurov

Slava Samodurov: 'Choreography doesn't have laws so far. It's a more unstable and free creative art'

Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds...

Read more...

Gleeful: The Real Show Choirs of America, E4

An American show choir emoting for all they're worth

My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20...

Read more...

Tacita Dean: Craneway Event, Frith Street Gallery

'Against the light, the dancers appear like marionettes framed within grids of glass and steel'

Silhouetted against the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, a pelican surveys the scene from a quayside bollard, then takes flight. The beautiful opening shot of Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event establishes a mood of elegiac tranquility. We are at...

Read more...

Les 7 Doigts, Peacock Theatre/ Cie Deborah Colker, touring

As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a...

Read more...

Christopher Wheeldon splits with his ballet company

In a shock that will deeply upset US and UK ballet, leading young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has abandoned his own company, Morphoses, which he set up in the US less than three years ago as a rare example of a choreographer-led...

Read more...
Subscribe to choreographers