Sadler's Wells
Birmingham Royal Ballet: Into the Music, Sadler's Wells review - a visual and aural feastSaturday, 05 November 2022
Carlos Acosta’s idea of putting live music first and foremost in BRB’s latest mixed bill was a no-brainer. The Midlands-based company, directed by Acosta since early 2020, is unique among British ballet companies in being able to call on its own... Read more... |
The Goldberg Variations, De Keersmaeker, Kolesnikov, Sadler's Wells review - keyboard harmony and atonal danceWednesday, 07 September 2022
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every... Read more... |
South Pacific, Sadler's Wells review - strong singing in Daniel Evans's fast-paced productionSaturday, 06 August 2022
How old is Emile de Becque? Perhaps because my first Emile was the 1958 film version’s Rossano Brazzi, my vision of the lonely French plantation owner in the South Pacific during the Second World War has been coloured by that casting: a visibly... Read more... |
The Rite of Spring, Pina Bausch/École des Sables, Sadler's Wells review - explosive and disturbingWednesday, 15 June 2022
Superstition, herd instinct, brutality, base terror. Whatever the precise narrative themes of Pina Bausch's response to The Rite of Spring – the most admired of dozens of dance settings of Igor Stravinsky’s score – it’s clear that it concerns... Read more... |
Dance (1979), Lyon Opera Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - luminous minimalismSaturday, 19 March 2022
Dance has long had an association with jewels and jewellery, which is something of an irony given that so few of today’s dancers earn the kind of money needed to buy any. Historically, male ballet fanciers would offer expensive trinkets post-... Read more... |
Acosta Danza, Sadler's Wells review - here comes the sunTuesday, 15 February 2022
If Carlos Acosta could have bottled the year-round sunshine of his native Cuba, he would have. Instead he did the next best thing and founded Acosta Danza. Seven years later, years which included a UK tour kiboshed by the first lockdown, when the... Read more... |
Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch review - struggling to make contactSaturday, 05 February 2022
Twelve years may have passed since her earthly demise, but you still hear people say they saw Pina Bausch the other night. Bausch remains synonymous with the company she founded, Tanztheater Wuppertal, and with a style of dance theatre that launched... Read more... |
Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, Sadler's Wells Theatre review - new candy, but the nuts are offFriday, 17 December 2021
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker... Read more... |
Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - a star turnSaturday, 06 November 2021
When a great performer takes on the running of a ballet company, the effect on its dancers can be transformative. It happened when Mikhail Baryshnikov took on American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s. It’s been happening at English National Ballet since... Read more... |
The Midnight Bell, New Adventures, Sadler's Wells review - dance theatre at its most compellingFriday, 08 October 2021
The British author Patrick Hamilton is best known for two highly successful plays, Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1939), which in turn became highly successful films. But it’s Hamilton’s novels, set among the fog-bound pubs and clubs of 1930s Soho, that... Read more... |
Creature, English National Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - bombastic and unreadableFriday, 24 September 2021
If a new ballet can be doomed by the weight of expectation, then Creature didn’t stand a chance. First scheduled to appear in the spring of 2020, then again last autumn, the publicity drive over the past weeks has had the air of marketing a used car... Read more... |
Hofesh Shechter Company, Double Murder, Sadler's Wells review - a well-intentioned but misjudged double billFriday, 17 September 2021
If I had to sum up in a single impression the work I’ve seen of Brighton-based, Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter (now OBE), it would be that of a rock gig. His shows are noisy, populous affairs, and he writes his own drumbeat-driven music... Read more... |
