contemporary dance
judith.flanders
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 audience. On these counts, Bern:Ballett’s visit to the Linbury fails to make the grade.Cathy Marston, Royal Ballet-trained, was the Opera House's first associate choreographer in residence a decade ago, and her works have had frequent showings over the years now. She is a serious and dedicated worker, she clearly has big ideas she wants to explore, but Read more ...
judith.flanders
Paul Taylor's Roses is called Roses because, well, because it is. There are no roses here, no flowery sentiment, no overwrought angst and emotion. This, one of Taylor’s most beautifully serene works, is the smell of roses on a still May evening: fleeting, evanescent and heart-breakingly beautiful. It is also some of the most magisterial - and startlingly original - choreography, even a quarter of a century after it was first made.The curtain rises on five couples, the women formally dressed in long navy dresses, the men, in contrast, in informal grey/brown undershirts and trousers. To Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes, watching contemporary dance, you feel that no choreographer has ever known a happy moment – such angst, such grief, such terrible agony rolls over the footlights out to the audience that arriving at the theatre feeling mildly content can seem like an act of subversion. On their last night of this too-short season, however, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company produced one of her most joyous and enjoyable pieces. For as the choreographer reminds us here, joy, cheerfulness and even sheer good temper are also emotions, and also worth exploring.First, however, comes tenderness. Read more ...
judith.flanders
How do simple things get complicated? How do they stay simple once they are complicated? These might, perhaps, be the questions from which choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, starts. But in fact, she starts, as all great choreographers do, with the music. “Music is always my first partner,” she once said. And in Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, three linked duets and one solo, there are indeed three people on stage: de Keersmaeker herself, the wonderful Tale Dolven, and Steve Reich, absent but ever present.All dance is a combination of form (the steps) and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Reports of ballet’s death are greatly exaggerated, but I’m not equally sanguine about the craft of choreography. Having sat dumbstruck through the four limping dogs masquerading as finalists in The Place’s prize “for dance” [sic] on Tuesday, I found myself amazed, simply amazed, all over again at the fecundity and sheer knowledge of Ashton’s Cinderella, having its umpteenth revival last night at the Royal Ballet.The point is not that these are apples and pears: the point is that it’s visible in premieres at The Place, Sadler’s Wells, and yes ballet too, that the knowledge, the curiosity, Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
Photography is linked closely with memory. Photographs help us recall family, friends, holidays, and it can attest to an event. But one could argue that it actually serves a purpose of forgetting. As we are immersed in a digital age, the photograph becomes a series of binary numbers which doesn’t exist until it is written or printed, and which can be erased as easily as it is captured. Photographs are now as close to human recall as technology will allow. Daniel Linehan's Montage for Three last night was a perfomance piece which tried to address that.Two dancers, Linehan and Salka Ardal Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Arts Council’s rearrangement of the dance world by its handling of its 15 per cent subsidy cut shows no change in its persistence in choosing to prefer bureaucratic structures to talent. The 15 per cent cut has been handed straight over to all the ballet companies, with no evidence of strategic thinking about the implications for numbers of dancers, productions or programming. But it’s in the area of contemporary dance that my first impression is of an urge at HQ to pass the buck of decisions to the regions to handle. Once again the talent, the artists, are much less visible in the pot Read more ...
judith.flanders
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 a history of these pre-emptive strikes – an earlier show was called Critics’ Choice – and they also have a history of living up to them. Fortunately for all, The Talent does too.Trevitt and Nunn, now in their early forties, have retired from dancing and are planning their future as dance master impresarios. They began by holding an open Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. It was the two musicians who thought up the idea of turning Hans Christian Andersen’s very beautiful and poignant 1897 fairytale into a ballet, a story in which the deliberate destruction of an astonishing, ingenious clock is not the end of the story, but becomes a celebration of creativity Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Aylesbury, a town without a theatre, has built itself one - a gleaming, glass-fronted, smack-you-in-the-eye 1,500-seater, driven and supported by the district council. High Wycombe and Milton Keynes must beware, so thin are the pickings these days for the regional theatres. The pity is that the Ballet Boyz’ show The Talent last night was the only night of decent dance programmed in this amazing new venue for half of 2011.This is the desert that the dumbing of box office has led to - swanky new theatres pop up with little but Chinese circus and Russian “fat” ballet to show, while proper Read more ...