★★★★✰ Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov's account of Swan Lake is spellbinding... if Scarlett's revision of the 1895 scenario makes even less sense than the original.
Tag - Bennet Gartside
★★★★✰ It is all too easy to assume that the first triple bill of the Royal Ballet's autumn season celebrates its creative heritage from the 1960s. In fact, two of the ballets were made for other companies...
★★★★★ With Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov... Theirs was a performance that caught up everyone in the sheer pleasure and excitement of spectacular dancing.
★★★★★ Liam Scarlett has devised a visual and emotional treat for audiences, fully justifying Kevin O'Hare's faith in him as a director and choreographer.
★★★✰✰ Leonard Bernstein wrote (in 1949): "I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.' Many choreographers have taken up the challenge, though his quasi-metaphysical musings have usually eluded them: dance is more corporeal than music.
★★★✰✰ The return of Christopher Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale in its third revival since 2014 brings newcomers to its many meaty roles. It also introduces new audience members to one of Shakespeare's late plays, with its convoluted plot.
★★★★★ Peter Wright's 1985 production for the Royal Ballet has had many interpreters, all subtly or extravagantly different. Nunez is amongst the finest, a perfectionist who seems realistically earthy as a country girl who loves dancing and ethereal as her defiant spirit.
★★★★✰ Elite Syncopations: Dancers from all five major British ballet companies took part, some doubling up roles in identical outfits so that identifying dancers was confusing. The stand-out solo in both the casts I saw was to the Calliope Rag, Monica Mason’s original role...
Hightlight - Yasmine Naghdi promoted to Principal dancer. Full press release with all Promotions, Joiners and Leavers
An all Frederick Ashton bill. Gallery by Dave Morgan...
★★★✰✰ Liam Scarlett treats Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, as essentially a domestic drama.
...a production that continues to set the standard against which later versions are measured.
These are dancers worth following in a wide repertory of works; it’s a shame to see them go while feeling we’ve barely gotten to know them better.
After an absence of eleven years, the Royal Ballet has finally returned to New York; they’re currently presenting two programs at the Koch Theatre,..
Lynette Halewood with her personal selection of London dance memories this last year…
Royal Ballet Don Quixote London, Royal Opera House 25 November 2014 Gallery of pictures by Dave Morgan www.roh.org.uk New directors of old ballets are often tempted to make them relevant to today by stripping away dated conventions and substituting new ones: earthy peasants, drunken party-goers, crazed hallucinations in place of visions. Carlos Acosta has not gone too far in his 2013 version of...
The programme was so underwhelming that I went twice in succession, to see whether alternative casts could make a difference.
The best of the videos and best piece of the night was Kim Brandstrup's Leda and the Swan using the much-loved Zenaida Yanowsky and Tommy Franzen
In the Royal Ballet's last programme for this season two old favourites frame the first performances of Alastair Marriott's latest work, Connectome. It's a well-balanced evening and gives the new piece every chance to shine.
Wheeldon has honed his craft in making a story ballet, much better constructed than his Alice in Wonderland. His core characters account for themselves in revealing solos and his pas de deux are no longer over-ingenious.