dotdotdot dance – Sadler’s Wells Wild Card bill – London
★★★✰✰ The three members of dotdotdot dance – Magdalena Mannion, Yinka Esi Graves and Noemi Luz – are British women with a passion for flamenco dance and its theatrical possibilities.
Royal Ballet – Obsidian Tear (premiere), The Invitation, Within the Golden Hour – London
★★★★✰ The range of roles shows the Royal Ballet dancers, up-and-coming soloist, established principals and character artists, at their very best.
Joffrey Ballet Concert Group – An Evening of Dance – New York
★★★✰✰ The Joffrey Ballet Concert Group, a pre-professional troupe of young dancers under the direction of David Robertson, performed a mixed but very split bill on Thursday night, roughly dividing the six-work program into two moods: spring/summer and dark and stormy.
New York City Ballet – Midsummer Night’s Dream – New York
★★★★✰ But the kids are just one element of what makes Midsummer tick. Another is the intelligence and efficiency with which the ballet tells its story.
American Ballet Theatre – La Fille Mal Gardée – New York
★★★★★ La Fille Mal Gardée is a ballet that glows from within, lighthearted, tender and bursting with happy ideas.
The McOnie Company – Jekyll and Hyde – London
★★★✰✰ Drew McOnie’s aim in his dance-theatre version of Jekyll and Hyde is to tell a ripping yarn without the use of words. He’s very much a Matthew Bourne disciple…
International Dance Festival Birmingham 2016 – Ballet BC, Shun Ito/Kei Miyata/EEIH, Motionhouse & free events
★★★✰✰ IDFB is great for Birmingham and I hope those in and around the city filled their boots.
Lost Dog / Ben Duke – Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) – London
★★★★✰ The work is proof that inventiveness is more important than a huge budget.
Northern Ballet – 1984 – London
★★★★✰ …an excellent reminder of how enduring Orwell’s work is, and how powerful a channel ballet can be for complex human emotions like distrust and defeat.
5 Questions to Kenneth Tindall about his new Casanova for Northern Ballet
“He lived a life of excess and theatrical flare!” Kenneth Tindall on Casanova.
Bolshoi Ballet – The Sleeping Beauty – Moscow
★★★✰✰ Olga Smirnova danced the role of Aurora. Smirnova is a dancer with impressive physical gifts: beautiful proportions, a long elegant line, a supple back and expressive arms…
Northern Ballet – Jane Eyre – Doncaster
★★★★✰ It’s actually the best new narrative work I’ve seen Northern Ballet do in many years.
American Ballet Theatre – Shostakovich Trilogy – New York
★★★✰✰ Shostakovich Trilogy is a rich work, containing too much to take in at a single sitting. It reveals some of its secrets, but not all.
Nederlands Dans Theater 2 (NDT2) – Schubert, Sad Case, Some Other Time, mutual comfort, Solo, Cacti – London
★★✰✰✰ Hans van Manen’s Solo for three men comes as a blessed relief for its luscious co-ordination and witty response to Bach’s Violin Partita.
New York City Ballet – Serenade, Hallelujah Junction, Duo Concertant, Western Symphony – New York
★★★★✰ Balanchine himself once said that Serenade is “many things to many people.” If it is one thing to City Ballet, it is the single ballet which they are expected to do perfectly every time.
English National Ballet Emerging Dancer Competition 2016
English National Ballet recently held their 2016 Emerging Dancer Competition at the London Palladium. Bruce Marriott reports on a good event done well…
Gallery – Nederlands Dans Theater 2 in Schubert, Sad Case and Some Other Time
NDT2 in works by Sol Leon & Paul Lightfoot. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Mark Morris Dance Group – Cargo, A Forest, Foursome, The – New York
★★★✰✰ Every few years the Mark Morris Dance Group presents an evening of dances at the company’s Brooklyn headquarters, a nondescript brick building across from BAM…
