It all started promisingly... And then there was lockdown and everything stopped. We had no idea of how events would play out. Surely this was going to be just for a couple of months?
Archive - December 2020
★★★✰✰ Russell Maliphant's 12-minute contribution to English National Ballet's digital season is a mass of contradictions. ...The result is familiar if you know Maliphant's work, but must be mesmerising for viewers who've never seen dancers appear as evanescent as fireflies.
★★★★★ That BRB managed to get this on at all is a small miracle - and the undiminished determination with which the dancers attack their work inspires passion in us all.
★★★★✰ Yuri Possokhov's contribution to ENB's digital season is based on the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman – a War and Peace about the Soviet Union during World War II
There’s no way around it: it’s been a miserable year for the performing arts here in the US... But still, there were highlights, moments in which for whatever reason, some spark illuminated the soul...
★★★★✰ This is very much a film: though it is based on an earlier Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui work 'When I’m Laid in Earth', its dreamlike tone and unnerving effects owe much to Thomas James’s imaginative camerawork and his interest in the supernatural...
★★★★✰ Amy Pearl really connected with Yoann Bourgeois’ upside down dream world, if the livestream experience itself was not always so brilliant.
★★★★★ Scottish Ballet have come up with a delightfully life-affirming present to blow away the Covid blues this Christmas. It's not a film of an existing ballet, as we usually see at this time of year, but a ballet feature film - something made just for the camera and in which the camera is choreographed into the action. The result is a huge success...
★★★★✰ There's no reason to feel short-changed by the Royal Ballet's Covid-compliant Nutcracker. The magic of Tchaikovsky's music and the beauty of the dancing still enchant spectators of all ages.
The Royal Ballet's new Covid-safe version of the well known production. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
Graham Watts talks to the multi-talented and very much respected Dane Hurst as he is named as the new artistic director of ground breaking Phoenix Dance Theatre. Expect great things to come...
★★★★✰ The streamed in-house recording of the premiere on 24 October 2020 features Ida Praetorius as the Sylph, Jon Axel Fransson as James and Kizzy Matiakis as the witch, Madge – her last role with the company.