Jann Parry talks to The Royal Ballet about what's happening on World Ballet Day this year and just what it means for some of those involved... Kristen McNally, James Hay and Assistant director Anthoula Syndica-Drummond.
Archive - September 2018
★★★✰✰ No evening of new works is perfect; the excitement lies in the hope that at some point some magic will happen. And in that solo for Taylor Stanley by Kyle Abraham, we got a glimpse of that magic.
"That’s what it’s always been about for me – the necessity to connect with an audience and express myself."
★★★★✰ A winning first program, one with the range and breadth that Smuin is famous for.
★★★★✰ The company seemed to be dancing with a special ferocity, as if to prove its worth and convince the world that this enterprise is, indeed, worth preserving and saving.
★★★★✰ A good night of new work for Leeds coupling a rising star from outside with local and much-loved company talent.
★★★★★ "I cannot recall being so moved at a dance performance for a very long time, if ever."
★★★★✰ The curtain calls for Robert Carter's "Dying Swan" are nearly as long as the ballet itself and just as funny.
Seeta Patel is about to tour the UK with her latest one-woman dance theatre work, "Not Today's Yesterday" - it's about the "whitewashing of history" and we wanted to know more...
★★★✰✰ Blanc shares her struggles with dieting, exercise regimes and the pressure to look perfect to the point where she has an epiphany which she calls her feminist boner.
★★★✰✰ The dance comments, illustrates and riffs on ideas and sounds in the music. Like Marsalis’s compositions, it’s neither banally literal, nor thoroughly abstract, but lies somewhere in the middle, deriving its inspiration and energy from currents in the music.
★★★★★ The Trocks' version of Swan Lake (or Lac, as it used to be known) restores some Soviet era removals. Benno, the hero's best friend and supporter, is back, as are mime sequences, mostly mystifying the participants...
★★★★✰ Directed by Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante, the return to the Barbican of Blak Whyte Gray, is again a triumph.
★★★✰✰ No trade description problems, here. This was exactly what it said on the tin: Natalia Osipova performing pure dance, enhanced only by recorded music and lighting designs varying from the merest of subtle tints to an explosion of floodlights...
Part lecture and panel discussion, part documentary screening and part performance "Vogue: The Unlimited House of Krip" was a good introduction to voguing culture, presented as part of the Southbank's Unlimited festival and built around the deaf and disabled dancers that form the House of Krip.
★★★✰✰ Rarely seen in London apart from performances at Breakin’ Convention, French choreographer Pierre Rigal brings something different to the hip-hop dance theatre scene with Scandale.
★★★✰✰ What will Co.Lab become? I look forward to finding out. Meanwhile, it’s simply encouraging to see these dancers and emerging choreographers create something of their own.
★★✰✰✰ Cherkaoui looks older than his years, so much so that his relationship in Play with Shivalingappa risks being unsettling. As dancers, they are no longer equals, as they must have been in 2008.
★★★★✰ Velvet Petal is Darkin’s latest work for the company, created in 2017 after she read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970s.
★★★✰✰ What I loved about it was that none of the acts fitted into neat categories but spilled out through porous art boundaries.