contemporary dance
Hanna Weibye
The challenge was already in the title for me: as both a dance critic and a strongly visual person, in the normal order of things I see the dance first and hear the music second. Last night's show, the second of the Sadler's Wells Composer Series of productions (the first was with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 2011), set out to challenge that order of perception by marrying dance and music in a partnership of equals: the formidable musical heft of Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia on the one hand, and on the other dance works by four major contemporary choreographers, including new commissions Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Akram Khan is unexpectedly softly-spoken. Acknowledged as a truly great dancer, he's a master of the classical Indian Kathak form that he trained in, and also supremely gifted at blending it with other movement vocabularies to create a personal signature style of elemental force, He creates hypnotic worlds in his pieces, with the kind of magnetic stage presence that draws you in so completely, you're often a little amazed, when the curtain drops, to find yourself still a perfectly ordinary human being sitting in theatre seat. Somehow, I expected this aura and gravitas to be matched by Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
How do you know Wayne McGregor? Dance-goers with long memories might remember Wayne McGregor as the wunderkind who founded his own company and became resident choreographer at The Place aged just 22. Lovers of contemporary dance will be familiar with his company Random Dance, which boasts some of the best dancers in the business and periodically brings sophisticated, hi-tech pieces to Sadler’s Wells. Balletomanes will know him from his work with major ballet companies, including a long-term residency at the Royal Ballet. Cognitive neuro-scientists, anthropologists and other academics might Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Grupo Corpo means Body Group, and if that sounds like the name of a global exercise consortium, it’s because it should be. If I were an entrepreneur media mogul type, I would have shot out of my seat at Sadler’s Wells last night and straight round to the stage door to persuade the Pederneiras siblings who run the company - it's emphatically a family business - that they need to do a fitness video or five, and syndicate an accompanying wordwide branded exercise class guaranteed to have the likes of Zumba and Les Mills, the BodyPump people, quaking in their last year’s Nike Airs.Grupo Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Royal Opera House is on fire this month. Not literally (unless someone knocks over the flaming braziers outside) but with the varied illuminations of the Deloitte Ignite Festival, co-curated by the Royal Ballet and Minna Moore Ede of the National Gallery. The theme this year is Myth, and specifically Leda's rape by Zeus in swan form, and Prometheus's gift of fire to humanity. Artworks dealing with these two stories, or with swans and fire more generally, are to be seen all over the building, which this weekend was open during the day for a variety of public events, from film screenings to Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Edinburgh Playhouse is the largest UK theatre regularly used for dance. The stalls alone seat more than the total capacity of Sadler’s Wells, and the two circles combined seat even more again, for a maximum audience of 3,059. To see it filled almost to bursting last night for the first night of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s visit to the Edinburgh International Festival is evidence – if any were needed – that the late Pina Bausch’s company are worldwide superstarsSuch is the power of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s dancers, that when you see from the programme that only ten feature in Sweet Mambo (seven Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Mounting a contemporary dance show together doesn’t seem like the best way to get over your ex, even if you are (or rather, were) ballet’s most fabulously marketable couple. But whatever their real-life relationship, audiences will always be keen – as last night’s packed Coliseum proved – to see Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, the electric, magnetic young Russians whose performances with the Bolshoi and the Mikhailovsky provoked such devoted fandom that they even got their own shorthand: Vasipova.The show they are mounting now is Osipova’s brainchild. Her determination and focus are Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Last night’s performance of PUSH at the London Colisem left me exhilarated and downcast in equal measure. Exhilarated because dancer Sylvie Guillem, dancer/choreographer Russell Maliphant and lighting genius Michael Hulls together create the Holy Grail of dance, a blend of intelligence, talent and charisma so stunning and convincing that it seems to trascend description and become sacramental. And downcast because this run is the last of PUSH in London, and so for most of us the last time we’ll ever see it, or perhaps even see Guillem or Maliphant perform.Rarely has the transience of dance as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank, and only in your mid-forties when injuries came calling and roles started to fall away - unwelcome signs that the end of a classical ballet career is nigh.With this tour of four new duets created especially for her, Whelan is experimenting with a new career as a freelance contemporary dancer. This is not a move made by many retiring ballerinas, since Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sure as carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the 2010s are following a standard 20-year nostalgia cycle by embracing the 1990s as their "retro twin" decade. The quiet rumblings of the last few years – student Nineties parties and the reappearance of the crop top – have this year flowered into a full-on revival that has hairdressers fingering their razors (remember the Rachel cut?), thirty-somethings wearing double denim again, and Rambert coming to Sadler’s Wells with revivals from 1990-1 alongside a Merce Cunningham classic from the Nineties’ own retro twin decade, the 1970s.Four Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián. But Aakash Odedra, who presented two new pieces, Murmur and Inked, in the Patrick Centre inside the Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, has had more dealings than most with superstar dancers and choreographers: his mentor Akram Khan is both (and incidentally a collaborator of Guillem’s). Russell Maliphant and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui have also created pieces Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If, standing on a station platform, your arms want to make shapes in the air; if, walking home, you are mesmerised by the curved toes of your shoes against the pavement; if, in the kitchen, a stray salad leaf on the floor transforms before your eyes into a tiny green lizard, head up, questioning – then (if you are over the age of 10 and reasonably level-headed) you have probably consumed some mind-altering substance.In my case, last Saturday night, it was (honest, m’lud!) nothing more dangerous than a cocktail of contemporary dance + Shakespeare, served up cool and cloudy by Canadian Read more ...