There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...

The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0].A first-time collaboration between the globally hot choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité's Simon McBurney, it presented a chilling catalogue of some of the plant and animal species, glaciers and rivers that are Read more ...

Akram Khan Company promises “a magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic”, and that’s more or less what you get. The choreography is striking and inventive, the dancing and staging superb.What work less well is the overall tone, which, for a piece that announces it is aimed at the world’s children as well as its adults, is pretty dark and doom-laden (there is no guidance here of its suitability for younger age groups), then veers towards levity, as if to balance out the gloom.Most older children, of course, won't be fazed by this bleak vision and don’t need telling that the planet Read more ...

She can do anything. That’s what choreographers say about Tiler Peck, the peppy New York City Ballet principal who has launched a stream of projects above and beyond the day job. You want speed? Wham, you get it. You want complexity? She can learn a tricky phrase in seconds then reverse it and riff on it. You want nerve, verve, musicality? Those choreographers are right, this dynamo has it all.Too bad Sadler’s Wells couldn’t schedule more than three performances of Turn It Out with Tiler Peck, her British debut as a solo operator. Perhaps no one quite believed the name would carry enough Read more ...

At the arthouse end of contemporary dance no one expects a packed house, still less serial packed houses for more than a week. Yet Sadler’s Wells was fully confident when it invited the dancer-choreographer Jules Cunningham – one of its New Wave Associates – to premiere a new work on its main stage.The special draw was that Cunningham’s company of three included the artist formerly known as Mel C, extending her Sporty Spice credentials to a bid to be seen as a serious exponent of pared-down, glacially cool art-dance. Happy to report, she acquits herself extremely well in a work that pays no Read more ...

Matthew Bourne is not the first choreographer to tinker with the story of The Sleeping Beauty and he won't be the last, such is the lure of Tchaikovsky's score and the potency of the plot.Good and evil, beauty and decrepitude, the suspended animation of adolescence – these are themes that will always invite a fresh spin. But Bourne’s version, now on its third season at Sadler’s Wells, signally fails to shed any new light on the archetypal tale of youth and hope triumphing over old grudges. The old ballet does this very well, some would say definitively. But by imposing an alien aesthetic on Read more ...

Of all the classic musical scores that could appeal to a choreographer, three are catnip: Ravel’s Bolero, Bizet’s Carmen, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Each has been set dozens of times and the veteran Swedish dancemaker Mats Ek has notched up all three.Such is the pull of Rite, in fact, that Ek has just created his second version, almost 40 years after his first. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with that earlier Rite, he told an interviewer, but he felt that the drama of the music had more to uncover – specifically on the subject of “young women being forced into a tradition, which has Read more ...

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 full-time orchestra (the Royal Ballet has to share theirs with the Opera), and it happens to be a first-class band.So the prospect of Britten and Beethoven forming meaty chunks in the typical three-ballet sandwich promised a feast – on the aural front at least – in an evening entitled Into the Music, to which an appropriate response might be “Who Read more ...

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 time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions?For the first, muted-silver hour, it was hard to say, given the difficulty of interpreting much in the dancer’s vocabulary and tallying it with what we were hearing in Kolesnikov’s myriad worlds. The sensation was Read more ...

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 greying, slightly stiff man with correct manners who conforms to the vague description “middle-aged”.Brazzi was actually only 42 when the film was released; another great Emile, Broadway’s Paolo Szot, was nudging 40 when he started playing the role. So why does Julian Ovenden, 45, seem almost overly youthful as Emile in Daniel Evans’s Chichester Read more ...

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 aspects of behaviour deep-rooted in the human animal.“How would you dance if you knew you were about to die?” was the question posed by the choreographer to her dancers back in 1975. And that visceral immediacy is brought to the fore by a 36-strong company of dancers assembled from across 14 African countries expressly for the performance of this Read more ...

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-performance to their favourite ballerina, and until well into the 20th century it was not uncommon for star dancers to wear their diamonds on stage, heedless of safety or practicality. The glittery little ear-studs worn as standard by the female corps in George Balanchine’s New York ballets are a remnant of that tradition. And it was Balanchine who gave Read more ...