Kenneth MacMillan
Jenny Gilbert
Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a valuable legacy for his widow and daughter – companies around the world have an endless appetite for staging them.But MacMillan’s shorter pieces have challenged the art form in a greater variety of ways. They have arguably also done more to shape the collective identity of the company that he tried several times to escape but which repeatedly drew Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s 50 years since the first, damning reviews of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon declared it to be too long and lumbered with terrible music. One of them also said that the title role was an appalling waste of the ballerina who, in the title role, was reduced to “a nasty little diamond-digger”.Roll on half a century and that teenage seductress is up there with Juliet, Giselle, Aurora and Odette-Odile – the most coveted as well as the most technically challenging roles in the canon – while the ballet has become a global money-spinner. A fast-moving love story set in an early 18th century Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London. Anthony Lau’s co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, ETT and Sheffield Theatres also catches a ride on the cultural zeitgeist, since it shares elements of its aesthetic with the multi-Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rather like that film, I suspect this show will divide audiences.We open on Georgia Lowe’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive.Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you came to this programme knowing nothing about the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, you may have learned a few things. That he died, tragically and rather dramatically, of a massive heart attack during a first night performance of one his own ballets. That he was "interested" in sex and death, and frequently choreographed violent forms of both in his ballets. That in later life he had a wife and daughter whom he loved. And that he was quite a significant 20th-century choreographer – though this last you'll have picked up more from the fact that this programme was aired at prime culture Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
One day someone will come up with an algorithm for the perfectly balanced triple bill. Until then ballet directors will have to make do with hit or miss. The Royal Ballet’s latest three-part offering would appear to tick the boxes: something old, something new-ish, and something just for fun. Yet while the evening can’t be faulted on the quality of performance, the effect is less than the sum of its parts.The best comes first, with a first revival of Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear, a work created two years ago for an all-male ensemble. As is often the case with this choreographer, nothing is Read more ...
David Nice
"Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets," declared Puccini in annoucing his own operatic setting of the Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. "I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion." That's the usual Kenneth MacMillan keynote, too, and in his third full-length ballet he was liberated to a degree by a Massenet score very different from that of the opera, rendered even more meaty by the re-orchestration of last night's conductor, Martin Yates. Yet the heroine remains elusive, oddly remote both to the man she loves and the men who pay her, and Francesca Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The unifying theme of this new Coliseum double bill is death, but don’t let that put you off. Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth and August Bournonville’s La Sylphide may seem like odd bedfellows, but both are a great deal more uplifting than their plot summaries might suggest, and in the hands of English National Ballet the evening is joyous, even life-affirming.MacMillan’s Song of the Earth was acquired by the company for its part in the national MacMillan anniversary celebrations last October, and they look at home in it already. Song’s combination of sincerity and levity is a natural Read more ...
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
There are different ways of celebrating a great artist’s legacy, and I suppose they have to coexist. One approach is raptly to admire his or her acknowledged masterpieces, the equivalent of making straight for Guernica or the Mona Lisa. The other approach is to delve in the archives and pull out the fragments and sketches, the early cartoons and the late pastels, and scrutinise them for evidence of the genius at work. The decision to try and recover a lost MacMillan ballet, Le Baiser de la Fée, for this Royal Opera House season marking the 25th anniversary of the choreographer’s death smacks Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Northern Ballet do a challenging job really well: on a mid-scale touring company budget and doing all the things mid-scale touring companies have to do (tour, obviously, but also outreach and audience-building and Christmas ballets for children), they manage to create a constant stream of new work, and have built up a real competence in storytelling on stage. But what they don't get to do is perform the greats of the classical ballet repertoire, either 19th or 20th century. Those have demands all their own, and Northern's dancers don't have the chance to work familiarity with those demands Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sure, there are things not to like about Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling. Confusing plot. Plethora of characters. Unsympathetic (anti-)hero. Borderline melodramatic choreography. Tense, scary dénouement. But to be at the Royal Opera House last night was to be convinced that Mayerling's merits far outweigh its demerits. A piece which can provoke the whole Royal Ballet company, dancers and musicians alike, to make such focused, sincere theatrical magic as we witnessed last night is a repertoire jewel, and seeing it done by its home company is an experience every ballet fan should have at least Read more ...