New York City Ballet – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – New York
★★★★✰ For Balanchine, Shakespeare’s characters are two-dimensional types, exemplary but wholly unreal. They are shadows in a shadow-play, representing this or that quality…
Gallery – San Francisco Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy
Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy comprises Symphony #9, Chamber Symphony and Piano Concerto #1. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Cas Public – 9 – London
★★✰✰✰ Cas Public’s 9, now at the Linbury Theatre is a curious mix, big ideas but flawed execution.
Rosie Kay Dance Company – 10 Soldiers – Birmingham
★★★★✰ “Ultimately both versions of “Soldiers” have the same impact of sending you home aware of the sacrifice involved and proud of what the military does.”
TAO Dance Theater – 4 & 9 – London
★★★★✰ There is something verging on the mystical about Tao Ye’s rigorously minimalist dance creations. The Beijing-based choreographer’s Numerical Series has stripped back dance to an almost forensic study…
Pam Tanowitz Dance – Four Quartets (T.S. Eliot) – London
★★★✰✰ Tanowitz is ideally placed to translate poetry into dance. Her vocabulary is effortlessly fluid with clear Cunningham/Graham/Brown influences and yet her own voice is strongly established.
American Ballet Theatre – Gala with The Seasons premiere + Ratmansky Trio bill – New York
★★★★✰ It’s impossible not to be impressed by the range of these works, from introspective and conversational (Symposium) to brilliantly classical (The Seasons) to dramatic (Dnieper).
Seeta Patel – The Rite of Spring, Dance Dialogues – London
★★★✰✰ Rite of Spring: Through the perspective of a South Asian gaze, the brutality and finality of the original ballet’s pagan sacrifice is tempered by a rich spirituality and the optimistic suggestion of an after-life. It’s still scary but less barbaric.
American Ballet Theatre – Harlequinade – New York
★★★★★ To my eye, this Harlequinade may be the most well-rounded of Ratmansky’s historically-minded stagings of Petipa.
Yorke Dance Project – Twenty: Playground, Between and Within, Communion, Imprint – London
★★★★✰ By swelling the numbers of her small touring company, Yolande Yorke-Edgell was able to mount a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Playground and a 10-strong ensemble for Robert Cohan’s Communion. The programme also included new works by Sophia Stoller and Yorke-Edgell herself.
Lauren Simpson Dance – Dance Exhibit – San Francisco
★★★★✰ I caught the show on closing night and saw a terrific company debut filled with collaboration, rigor and a connection to the visual art community.
Birmingham Royal Ballet – Seasons in our World, Peter and the Wolf – Cheltenham
★★★✰✰ Bintley feels strongly about tradition (much more so than most other directors) and the commissions are his way of saying what’s important and passing that baton on.
5 Questions to Myles Thatcher about a different take on ballet and working on Scottish Ballet’s Digital Season
www.instagram.com/mylesthatcher www.sfballet.org Scottish Ballet’s Digital Season: 16 May – 16 June 2019 Myles Thatcher is a choreographer and dancer with San Francisco Ballet who’s created a stir there, and elsewhere in North…
Rambert – PreSentient, Rouge, In Your Rooms – London
★★★✰✰ The bill is a bold statement of intent – but a little underwhelming in reality.
Parsons Dance – Round My World, Eight Women, Runes, Caught, Nascimento – New York
★★★★✰ I can’t recall ever leaving a theater after seeing a Trey McIntyre work, and not feeling better about things.
Gallery – Deborah Colker Dance Company in Dog Without Feathers
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Viviana Durante Company – THREE/8.38/SEVEN – London
★★✰✰✰ The show at Wilton’s Music Hall, produced and directed by former ballerina Viviana Durante, was originally billed as The Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht…
Yang Liping – Rite of Spring – London
★★★✰✰ As with most retellings, Liping’s centres on a young woman destined to dance herself to death. However, the dancemaker has invoked Buddhist principles, including the concept of reincarnation…
Royal Ballet – Within the Golden Hour, Medusa, Flight Pattern – London
★★★✰✰ A very mixed bill… Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Medusa (★★✰✰✰), Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour (★★★★✰) and Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern (★★★★✰)
