Araminta Wraith, Scottish Ballet soloist, is a DanceTabs guest blogger during the companies 50th anniversary season. This is her fourth blog and all about dancers and injuries - it's a very personal and heartfelt tale...
Archive - October 2019
★★★★✰ A charismatic and compelling performance and a forensic examination of embattled masculinity, holding the attention throughout with unflagging energy.
★★★✰✰ A devised work, it pits six clowns against each other – a rancorous superannuated troupe locked in a queasy co-dependent relationship despite the fact they loathe each other.
★★★★✰ Fascinating for the duration of its 50 mins, Split focusses on duality – charting the shifts between Ashley McLellan and Lilian Steiner as they negotiate their space, timing, movement and relationship.
★★★★★ The dance artist Oona Doherty was transplanted to Belfast from London aged ten, and there was the gaze of a curious outsider about Hard to Be Soft.
★★★★✰ On the penultimate day of the fall season, I managed to catch a performance of New York City Ballet’s revival of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace. The 1958 piece, which had its City Ballet premiere in 1966, was last performed here in 2000.
★★★★★ Quite some achievement by Pam Tanowitz, to have followed treasured works by Cunningham and Ashton with one that pays homage to both, yet stands on its own as her distinctive tapestry of dance.
★★★✰✰ This three-act three-hour-long Paquita is a brainchild of Smekalov, who is a second soloist with the company. He wrote his own libretto, largely borrowing from the Cervantes novella La Gitanilla...
★★✰✰✰ Seven international companies appeared on the Sadler’s Wells main stage, all of whom are prize winners of the bi-annual international competition Danse Élargie: Dance Expanded - the brain wave of Boris Charmatz and director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota...
★★★✰✰ The fascination with ballet is strong in Forsythe. After years of creating a form of dance theater in Germany, he has returned to his classical roots with a renewed energy.
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★★✰ You have to marvel at the skill and precision of the 15 dancers in Crowd, the creation of the Franco-Austrian choreographer Gisele Vienne and the opening show of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival.
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★★✰ Everything in Shivalingappa’s style emphasizes clarity, shape, and intention. ... a very satisfying evening of dance.
Featuring works by Merce Cunningham, Frederick Ashton and Pam Tanowitz. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★★✰ A double-bill of compelling contemporary movement, the centerpiece of the performance was Azoth, a new collaboration between Artistic Director Alonzo King, tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and composer/pianist Jason Moran.
★★★★✰ Masilo and company unpack this famous story of a wronged woman, establishing a refreshingly black, South African and feminist perspective.
★★★✰✰ Clarke doesn’t pull any punches with his ending ...once again, a community is left defiant but defeated.
★★★✰✰ Robbins’ response to Chopin (in Dances at a Gathering) is also extraordinary: sensitive, simple, vulnerable, direct, un-fussy.
★★★★✰ Sarah Lamb and Vadim Muntagirov, as Des Grieux, are not new to the roles and their understanding of the characters and the choreography has deepened with experience.