sat 06/09/2025

Dance

theartsdesk Debate: Dance's Question Time

What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers' training, choreographers' creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance...

Read more...

The Sleeping Beauty, Royal Ballet

The Sleeping Beauty was the ballet that kissed the then Sadler’s Wells Ballet into stardom in 1946; after a string of poorly conceived Beauty productions, today’s Royal Ballet hurtled back 60 years in 2006 to try to recapture some of that historic...

Read more...

Hall family and Wales shine in nationwide stage awards

Port Talbot’s staging of The Passion with Michael Sheen won the highest accolade at the Theatre Management Association Awards yesterday, which honour the best of work touring Britain beyond London during the 2010-11 season.The adventurous Welsh...

Read more...

Dance faces its Question Time - theartsdesk to hold live debate

As great changes happen in the British arts economy, what lies ahead for dance? What are the questions to ask about what we will watch in future, what we will create for others to see, what we will perform, what we will pay for?theartsdesk and the...

Read more...

Some Like It Hip Hop, ZooNation, Peacock Theatre

The title is a warning, as is the cheesy grinning poster - this is going to be Fun with a capital F, and Feel-good too, and Family Friendly. And it is going to clean up hip hop’s badass image. I was already prejudiced against it before I sat down....

Read more...

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Rian, Sadler's Wells

Wallets have been emptied by the proliferation of outstanding dance evenings in the past month - Akram Khan’s Desh, Lucinda Childs, the Merce Cunningham farewell - but increase your overdraft, for here is a heart-lifting and ingeniously ingenuous...

Read more...

La Fille Mal Gardée, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells

It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think...

Read more...

Richard Alston Dance Company, Focus on Alston, The Place

Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons...

Read more...

Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Barbican Theatre

There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon

Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the...

Read more...

Armitage Gone! Dance, Queen Elizabeth Hall

I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics...

Read more...

Beyoncé stole my moves, says high priestess of modern dance

Has the great pop diva Beyoncé plagiarised the great modern dance diva Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker? This is the burning question that has today sent disco popsters and fans of austere contemporary dance in a feverish crush to YouTube, comparing...

Read more...
Subscribe to Dance