★★★★✰ Short & Sweet is a very mixed bill, ranging from the arcane to the absurd, celebrating otherness with lots of laughter.
Tag - John Cage
Released on the 13 March 2020, CUNNINGHAM, the new film about Merce Cunningham, has sadly emerged into a COVID-19 locked down world – but Jann Parry makes a compelling case for seeing it sooner rather than later and CUNNINGHAM is currently available to see at home in many formats.
★★★★✰ As part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial celebrations, Rambert dance company took over all four floors of Sadler's Wells before the on-stage performance of this year's Event.
★★★★✰ The title of the latest triple bill in the Linbury studio theatre is taken from The Observer's dance critic's review of the Merce Cunningham Company's arrival in Britain in 1964.
★★★★✰ A quote from The Observer's dance critic, Nigel Gosling, in 1964: 'Merce Cunningham and his company have burst on the British scene like a bomb ...heart-warming proof that here is an art with a future...'
★★★✰✰ This summer's showcase of English National Ballet School's students was the first under its new director, Carlos Valcarcel... The Wimbledon programme consisted of two creations by him, two by students, and excerpts from The Sleeping Beauty as a conclusion.
★★★★✰ After much tumult over the holidays, New York City Ballet has begun its first post-Peter Martins season. If you’re just catching up, the company’s “ballet master in chief” – ie artistic director – of over thirty years retired on New Years Day, in the midst of an investigation into allegations of physical abuse and sexual harassment.
★★★★★ The programme ended with a revival of the ebullient and uplifting Gypsy Mixture...
★★★★✰ For its second visit to the Joyce (the first was in 2015) Compagnie CNDC brought an excellent and well-balanced program. Two works from the sixties, followed one from the eighties...
★★★✰✰ Two interesting impulses have been evident in the modern and post-modern dance scene in New York of late....
(Works danced: Diagonal, Trio A With Flags, Chair-Pillow, Excerpt from Goldberg Variations, The Courtesan and the Crone, Untitled Touch)
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance & Lyon Opera Ballet – Icons: Graham, Cunningham, Taylor – New York
★★★★✰ Sunday night, the New York dance scene flocked to see three of America’s dance pioneers side by side in “Icons: Graham, Cunningham, Taylor.
★★★★✰ "One of the things I admire most about these works is the degree to which men and women are interchangeable. Brown’s movement has no maleness or femaleness attached to it..."
Benjamin Millepied, the new director of the Paris Opera Ballet, made a daring choice of programme for the Christmas season at the opulent Palais Garnier opera house: a triple bill of contemporary works...
So a tip to the wise up front - see them in London while you can or catch them on their subsequent UK tour....
Ballet San Jose is full of surprises...
We catch up with Septime Webre, choreographer and artistic director of Washington Ballet. So what makes him get up in the morning? Oksana Khadarina finds out...
...while I may have successfully held my own for the first two rounds, I’d been soundly beaten by the end.
The gala formula really worked. An eclectic selection of dances – six duets and three short ballets – offered something for almost every taste...
His body is like a cubist deconstruction of the human form, all angles and planes. His fingers and wrists can be as rigid as hammers or as florid as Moorish arabesques.
Where Cheap Lecture seemed content to dispense casual and unpretentious pearls of wisdom in rhythmic form (“things made with effort sometimes only show effort”), Rebelling Against Limits seems shot-through with a minor angst...