contemporary dance
charlotte.macmillan
New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the opening solo created for a Diaghilev tribute programme.Russell Maliphant explains his original inspiration by Nijinsky's drawings to theartsdesk here. The dancers are Daniel Proietto, Olga Cobos and Silvina Cortés. Lighting is by Michael Hulls, conceived in combination with Es Devlin, costumes by Stevie Stewart, music by Andy Cowton and Erik Satie. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a distilled 60-minute spell of dark, hushed beauty that touches on disturbing things: on ecstasy, madness, desire, jealousy, resignation to the void, and of course on Vaclav Nijinsky.Maliphant made a solo last year for Sadler’s Wells on a Diaghilev tribute programme. It whirled like Nijinsky’s paintings from his hospital, where the young dancer retreated all Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great stars get lost sometimes. Up there in outer space, ringed with adulation, when they get a mid-life crisis sometimes they get sucked into a vanity black hole. No light emits, just the tatters of an angel who lost his way in his own legend.Carlos Acosta is one miracle dancer whose unique gift for the past 15 years has been to free us from our sense of cloddishness. He was sent from heaven like Mercury, with winged feet, to elevate us all by his divinely sprung dancing. He is sweet and funny as Colas, easily led by the nose by a sly girl. He’s the greatest Spartacus I’ve ever seen, a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Confirmation today of the astonishing news from Russia - Nacho Duato will indeed become the new director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St Petersburg’s second company, from the New Year. The Spanish contemporary choreographer will be the first foreigner to lead a Russian ballet company for more than a century.The Mikhailovsky General Director, fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, said at today's press conference in St Petersburg: "Engaging an internationally known choreographer in the prime of his strength and talents is incredibly significant not only for the Mikhailovsky Theatre, but for Russian Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the middle of the pulverisingly loud and utterly thrilling experience that is Hofesh Shechter’s new production Political Mother, I wished suddenly that all dancers could come and see this piece, see what clarion theatre dance can be. If the theatrical thread often thins almost to vanishing point in some of the more mediocre ballet productions that turn up, this work is a positive rope of theatricality, thick, hard, massive, a slab of incredibly loud music and incredibly fierce, reflective emotion.Shechter is an Israeli Londoner, both choreographer and composer - choreographer, that is, in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's tough being a critic. There I was last night at Punchdrunk's first operatic foray, The Duchess of Malfi - put on in collaboration with the English National Opera - trying to make sense of a typically Punchdrunkian world that had been shattered across three never-ending floors of disused office space in the back of beyond, attempting to maintain objectivity, coolness, clarity, soberly parsing the multifarious activity, diligently attending the sporadic music-making, scribbling it all down nerdily in my notepad, when a dishy young performer nobbles me, drags me into a darkened room, locks Read more ...
judith.flanders
One of the most difficult questions to answer is what makes a great performer great? So much that happens on stage takes place in an eye-blink. Dancer A is "better" than Dancer B, but why? Critics talk about "line", about "extension", about how dancers use and shape space. But it is hard to see shapes in words. Now portrait photographer and installation artist David Michalek has, with one deft blow, solved this problem. Plastered over three big screens in Trafalgar Square (and later in the month in Shoreditch), 50 dancers perform five seconds each of dance – five seconds that Michalek then Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, Turkey, 3-30 JuneThe 38th annual music festival in the jewelled city of culture-clash continues its strong classical showing with Radu Lupu and Lang Lang, the Borodin Quartet and Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Equally attractive is the chance to hear a lively ethnic and folkloric music programme. www.iksv.org/english/Leipzig, Germany, 11-20 JuneThe 85th annual Bach Festival in his home town also features his two great champions Brahms and Schumann. The Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Ballet get involved in ballet to Bach by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Philippe Read more ...
Sarah Kent
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 Ford Point, on the east shore of the bay, in a magnificent building – a Ford factory that made military vehicles in World War Two, but closed down in 1955. Floor to ceiling windows afford breathtaking views across the water and allow the California light to flood in, transforming the floor into a liquid sheen of shadows and reflections.In Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her company went into something of a creative abeyance to focus on producing a new dance community centre, this was one of Davies’s many gems of dance poetry that I feared we might never be able to bask in again.Fortunately last night Rambert turned up, under Mark Baldwin’s sensitive direction, picking up this 1995 beauty and one of Merce Cunningham’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
These past five days in May have seen some fairly oddball goings-on labelled as "New Dance at the Southbank Centre". Accidentally coinciding with other oddball goings-on on the national scene, since it was booked up long ago before elections were called. But no double-act in politics is likely to be quite as peculiar and weirdly stimulating as that between the Spanish cabaret artiste La Ribot (often to be found nude) and the postmodern French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, playing two sides of a woman who can’t help being at war with herself, like slapstick twins or conjoined politicians. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 1988 young contemporary choreographer Mark Morris, newly installed in Brussels’ munificent Théâtre de la Monnaie as resident dancemaker to succeed the Emperor of Big, Maurice Béjart, thought not just big but grandly off-beam. Instead of Béjart’s slickly sexy, stripped-down divinities of modern ballet, Morris gave the audience chubby, barefoot, all-sorts dancers naively skipping and slapping each others’ bottoms; instead of mass-market arena confections to starry rock, he chose to work with John Milton’s archaic poetry and George Frederick Handel’s filigree proprieties; instead of artful Read more ...