contemporary ballet
theartsdesk
With forelock-tugging celebrations of a choreographer who died 25 years ago and a summer visit by the Mariinsky the highest-profile events in the calendar, 2017 may not be remembered as a vintage year for British dance. But there were striking moments aplenty if you knew where to look for them, and companies, directors and dancers making magic even in ordinary circumstances. As the year ends, theartsdesk correspondents cast their minds back and pick out the best of those magical moments. As always, the criterion is memorability: this is not a comprehensive review of who was worthy or Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I can imagine Monica Mason, the artistic director who commissioned Christopher Wheeldon's 2011 Alice, feeling pretty pleased with herself as she looked around the Covent Garden auditorium last night at an audience buzzing with excitement for the first performance of the new season. At its 2011 premiere the piece was a big step into the unknown, the Royal Ballet's first full-length new work in 16 years. Now on its fifth run, Alice has proved to be the company's most successful new story ballet in a good deal longer than that.Alice paved the way for a run of new full-length ballets: three more Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Years ago, MC14/22 (Ceci est mon corps), the Angelin Preljoçaj piece with which this Scottish Ballet double bill opens, made a deep impression on Christopher Hampson. So deep that, once he became Artistic Director of Scottish, he actively sought it out for the company, pulling it out of unperformed obscurity to the surprise even of the choreographer, and using an Edinburgh Festival platform to stage a piece that would have been commercially unviable in the normal order of things. Admirable, you might say: artistic conviction fighting back against the creeping infiltration of the utile. Bravo Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Koen Kessels is on a mission to change the culture around music in ballet. Anyone who has heard the Belgian conduct will know that he is the right person for the job: Kessels makes the classic scores come alive in the pit like nobody else I’ve heard. I will never forget a performance of Swan Lake with Birmingham Royal Ballet in which he had us all pinned to our seats with excitement, shaping every phrase of the familiar music as if it had never been heard before. This gift has brought him the top music job at two of Britain’s major ballet companies, the Royal Ballet in London and Birmingham Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House. A one-acter, but at 45 minutes a substantial one, set to the work of the same name by Rachmaninov, this premiere was an important moment for Scarlett, whose last two new works for the company, Frankenstein and Age of Anxiety, received at best mixed reviews. Symphonic Dances is not a masterpiece, but it's the best Scarlett I've seen Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Is English National Ballet's current predilection for acquiring European repertoire some kind of anti-Brexit statement, or just smart brand positioning? Last night's performance at Sadler's Wells, a sequel in all but name to the programme called Modern Masters they performed two years ago, put William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (famously created for the Paris Opéra Ballet) alongside eminent Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen's Adagio Hammerklavier and - coup of coups - Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, still performed almost exclusively by her own company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Can thirty minutes of contemporary ballet say something meaningful about the modern refugee crisis? It has been the surprise of the season to find myself asking this question not once, but twice, at the Royal Ballet. In Wayne McGregor's Multiverse, premiered in November, images of refugees on boats suggested a critical agenda but the dancing stayed abstract and impersonal. Could Crystal Pite's new Flight Pattern, which opened last night at the Royal Opera House, do a better job of responding to the human tragedy of displacement, or are there some things dance just can't say?Even without its Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Tree of Codes is a work made from a work made from a work. Based on Jonathan Safran Foer's book-form art piece, which is itself based on Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, Wayne McGregor has fashioned a choreographic creation using a triptych of his own.One third is choreography, but there are two other equal parts in Olafur Eliasson's light sculpture art and Jamie xx's musical composition. The three work together in harmony, meshing and bonding to create a perfect whole.There's a powerful opener with total theatre blackout and pounding electro-dance rhythms as dancers flit like Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Thank God for Akram Khan, English National Ballet, and Tamara Rojo. Their new Giselle, which finally arrived at Sadler's Wells this week after its Salford premiere in September, is a work of intelligence, power, beauty, and - most gratifying of all in this age of lies, damned lies and politics - stunning integrity. This is a ballet about issues that matter, made by people who know what they're doing.Giselle, thematically much the richest of the 19th-century ballets, is a strong choice for a remake, with a tight two-act structure on which to hang the exploration of all sorts of interesting Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"My mission is to create new dance with new music and new design that is intimately plugged in to the world we live in today. I am motivated to make contemporary work that speaks of now and that is totally present-tense," Wayne McGregor explains in the programme note for last night's triple bill of his works at the Royal Opera House. It's the McGregor-speak that we have all come to know: a vanishingly tiny message wrapped up in obfuscatory verbiage. I find it increasingly sad that McGregor seems to have become trapped in his own, over-thought, narrative: he has a questing spirit and a curious Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What do women want? Ballet plots are not the best guide, since the main desiderata – a well-paying job, coffee dates with girlfriends, not to die young of a broken heart – are rarely the lot of ballet heroines. Comedies at least tend to have the not-dying part covered, but they often fall down on at least one of two other big requirements: that one's family should be supportive, and that one's romantic partner should not be a chump. Pity Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, which the Bolshoi presented in London last night in Jean-Christophe Maillot's 2014 production for the company: burdened Read more ...