★★★★✰ Wrapping up Dance Umbrella, "Shoreditch Takeover" was a celebration of cross-disciplinary work. It featured two dance works, poetry and a film, not to mention a DJ...
Archive - October 2017
★★★★✰ It’s always exciting to discover a new side of an artist. For this, and for an immensely entertaining show, we have to thank Matthew Bourne.
★★★✰✰ The director Suzie Willson plays well with our fascination with people-watching...
★★★★★ Dorrance Dance is received with such universal enthusiasm and love that reviewing them feels like an exercise in redundancy, like piling on to a scrum that’s already 30 players deep.
Gallery by Stephen Wright...
★★★✰✰ What’s different about Schumacher’s dances isn’t so much the end result as the process. He always commissions new music and builds the ballet up from the bottom, with the help of an external source of inspiration.
★★★★✰ 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...
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★✰✰ The choreographer and L.A. Dance Project director Benjamin Millepied is a mover and a shaker, a clever curator, a man of taste, a force in the dance world. But is he good choreographer?
★★★✰✰ Peking opera’s blend of highly stylised acting, singing, music and movement is always a feast for the senses. The costumes are reason enough to watch in themselves...
★★✰✰✰ It started sedately enough, with the three men and three women emerging in stretchy black dresses...
★★★★✰ The second programme commemorating the 25th anniversary of Kenneth MacMillan’s death revealed his very different responses to music, and to human nature.
★★★✰✰ The program opened and closed with the most recent works: Jessica Lang’s Her Notes and Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Both premiered at ABT in 2016, and both are works whose inspiration largely comes from their scores.
★★✰✰✰ Beautiful, calming imagery is not in the vocabulary of Anatomie.
★★★★✰ The ENB production of La Sylphide has been staged by three luminaries of Danish ballet, Frank Andersen, Eva Kloborg and Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, and is, therefore, one supposes, as authentic to the August Bournonville ideals, as possible...
★★★★★ ...the dancing is life enhancing and the audience leaves on a high of pleasure.
★★★★✰ How many ways can you hear the same piece of music? This inspired programme by Lyon Opera Ballet suggested, with elegant simplicity, that there are as many ways to hear something as there are people to hear it.
In the first of the mixed bills celebrating Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets, 25 years after his death, "Le Baiser de la fée" intrigued me because the questions it posed about his development as a choreographer...
★★★✰✰ Since its creation 140 years ago, La Bayadѐre has been one of the Mariinsky Ballet’s calling cards and the Russian company can make this enduring classic shine in all its stylistic glory and theatrical splendor.
Featuring dancers from Birmingham Royal Ballet, Scottish Ballet, The Royal Ballet, English National Ballet and Northern Ballet. Gallery by Dave Morgan...