Royal Ballet
Carlos Acosta, Classical Selection, London ColiseumWednesday, 31 July 2013![]() The mighty adorable Carlos Acosta is at the London Coliseum this week in all his might and all his adorableness - four times, you may like to know, he appears without his shirt on. This is relevant, because it’s not the preening bare-... Read more... |
Opinion: Ballet's Stars are RevoltingMonday, 15 July 2013![]() Are we seeing a breakdown in the ballet company system? Where the brightest stars used to twinkle in the great companies, all is changing. Alina Cojocaru, the great Royal Ballet ballerina, has announced today she's joining English National Ballet -... Read more... |
Performers: A Season in PhotographsSaturday, 06 July 2013![]() A stage performance in any art form communicates through sound and motion. A photographer's task is to capture the dramatic experience in the silence and stillness of the 2D image. In the worlds of ballet and opera, none does it with more commitment... Read more... |
Mayerling, Royal BalletSunday, 16 June 2013![]() My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Ballerina Leanne BenjaminFriday, 14 June 2013![]() It's the uniqueness of the Royal Ballet ballerina Leanne Benjamin that tomorrow night at Covent Garden, aged nearly 49, she will be playing a sex-mad teenager, and no one will have the slightest difficulty believing it. Then she'll retire. Not for... Read more... |
Mayerling, The Royal BalletThursday, 06 June 2013![]() So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina... Read more... |
Raven Girl, Royal Ballet/ Witch-Hunt, Bern Ballett/ The Great Gatsby, Northern BalletSaturday, 25 May 2013![]() Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’... Read more... |
Mayerling, The Royal Ballet/ Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, English National BalletSunday, 21 April 2013![]() The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over... Read more... |
La Bayadère, The Royal BalletSunday, 07 April 2013![]() Jane Austen would approve, I think, of the plot of La Bayadère, which is about class and wealth getting in the way of love. She might have difficulty with the setting. It is a grand, exotically located ballet offering us an fantastical India of... Read more... |
Still Shocking - The Rite of Spring 100 Years OnMonday, 01 April 2013![]() Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: Sergei Polunin triumphs in MayerlingMonday, 25 March 2013![]() Quite simply, the performance was one of those rarest of events in the theatre that will be talked about for generations - the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, with the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin making his debut... Read more... |
The Metamorphosis, Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 19 March 2013![]() “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And... Read more... |
