dance
American Ballet Theatre, Prog 1, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 01 February 2011
Was it the worst-played and worst-danced performance of Duo Concertant I’ve ever seen? I can’t remember a direr in my experience of quite a few DCs. But then the opening night of American Ballet Theatre’s London tour was a set of fine promises falling flat with a thud. A delicate new sextet ruined by the piano player. A masterpiece of musical ballet murdered by the violinist, the pianist and the ballerina. A cod-ballet duet by Twyla Tharp deflated by an unhumorous leading... Read more... |
Du Goudron et Des Plumes, Barbican/ Flogging a Dead Horse, Roundhouse StudioFriday, 28 January 2011
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy angles, refashioned while decorating the tasks with acrobatic surprises. Read more... |
Les Antliaclastes, Institute of Contemporary Arts/ A Guide to PuppetryMonday, 24 January 2011
The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event. Read more... |
Swan Lake, Royal BalletSunday, 23 January 2011
The return of the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake production coincides with the tumult over the film Black Swan, about which the company’s marketing department must be pretty pleased, even if some of the dancers aren’t. The chief surprise for any newcomers drawn to the ballet by the film, obsessing as it does about the leading ballerina, must be how long it takes to meet the Swan Queen at all. Read more... |
LIMF: La Maldición De Poe, Purcell Room/ Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, Barbican PitThursday, 20 January 2011
The up - which I’m sorry not to have reported on before it ended last night - was the Spanish puppetry troupe Teatro Corsario, who made their hour’s strut and fret upon the stage in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room a pleasingly diverting wee horror tale, La Maldición de Poe (The Curse of Poe), filled with gory corpses and spectral lighting and awful bloodthirsty characters. Read more... |
Giselle, Royal Ballet/ Swan Lake, Russian State Ballet of SiberiaWednesday, 12 January 2011
The chasm between the top-class ballet available to London-area ballet-goers and the low-grade stuff peddled in the regions is the field where the battle to save ballet’s soul is nightly won or lost. Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, English National Ballet, London ColiseumSunday, 09 January 2011
Busy, busy, busy tends to have been the watchword of Rudolf Nureyev’s elaborate choreographies. Prokofiev, as the most direct of musical dramatists, demanded streamlining from Sergey Radlov’s complicated scenario in 1935, but Nureyev tends to have jammed extra plotlines back in with un-Shakespearean knobs on. Thank heavens Patricia Ruanne, his Juliet for the initial four-week run back in 1977, and his first Tybalt, Frédéric Jahn, have returned to work so hard on the staging's fiddly bits as... Read more... |
Year Out/Year In: Dance is Still With Us (So Far)Wednesday, 29 December 2010
I was taken to task by a commenter this year who told me I should go and review music, if I couldn't enjoy dance. Hm. One takes such things to heart, but it's humbug. While piling up memories over 25 years might mean that the noise in my memory is getting more and more obtrusive, that doesn't mean you can't suddenly find the corker one night that wipes the field clean and places a new memory there which will move your yardstick yet again. Read more... |
Strictly Come Dancing: The Final, BBC OneSunday, 19 December 2010
It’s been a journey, an emotional rollercoaster, since 14 soap stars and sports personalities abandoned reality three months ago, donned a series of spandex and chiffon outfits and embarked upon the most important experience of their lives. They all gave it 110 per cent, took disappointment on the chin and came back fighting, and last night the three finalists battled it out for the ultimate prize – the Strictly Come Dancing 2010 glitterball trophy. Read more... |
The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumSunday, 12 December 2010
The lighting chief holds the success of a magical fairy-tale staging in his hands. Whatever the designer has done, however fantastical and virtuosic his visions, the lighting chief can ruin it. So it is with English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker, in which two gigantic miscalculations kill any of its old-fashioned atmosphere. Read more... |
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