★★★✰✰ Although David Nixon authored this ballet long before Lord Grantham was a twinkle in Julian Fellowes’ eye, it certainly provides an inkling of Swan Lake meets Downton Abbey.
Author - Graham Watts
Dance Writer/Critic. Member of the Critics' Circle, Chairman of the Dance Section and National Dance Awards Committee. Writes for leading dance magazines & websites - in UK, Europe, USA, Japan & cyberspace. Graham is based in London.
★★★★✰ Tipping Point is both simple and complex...
★★★★✰ The optimum number of chews in the mastication of a cherry tomato is 21. This was just one of the foodie facts that I learned during this epicurean epic...
★★★★✰ This is my sixth encounter with Boris Eifman’s danced biography of Auguste Rodin, via viewings that have now been spread over three great cities...
★★★★✰ All-in-all this was an outstanding programme of entertaining dance...
★★★✰✰ Now in its twelfth year, Ellas Crean features eighty multidisciplinary events, including many theatre, dance and music premieres. This particular dance triple bill was accompanied by a fascinating exhibition...
★★★★✰ Golgota has a strong visual appeal, broadly consistent with the religious imagery in the paintings of El Greco and another 17th Century Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbarán.
★★★★✰ Solo performances do not get more personal, or more powerful, than this.
★✰✰✰✰ This abstract, largely silent interpretation of As You Like It ( a Shakespeare comedy I have never seen danced before) was so unintelligible that I might as well have been hearing it spoken in Urdu.
★★✰✰✰ Far from being immortal, this production suffers from an acute identity crisis. I can’t recall another performance that has veered from so good to so awful...
★★★★✰ Flamenco Festival London 2016 (at Sadler's Wells) took a little diversion away from dance with guitarist Vicente Amigo presenting a night of his work. And OK, yes, there was some dance! Graham Watts reports...
★★★✰✰ "The memorable sensory atmosphere of the work was both enhanced and interrupted by the live music onstage..."
Scottish Ballet are touring Christopher Hampson's "Cinderella" this Christmas - Graham Watts was at the European premiere in Edinburgh for DanceTabs...
It seems now to be a given that any new work by Izadora Weiss will combine dramatic, narrative-based dance theatre with a profound visual impact, danced to challenging, powerful music.
One essential factor in the current success of Phoenix is a cohort of excellent dancers...
Visually, No Lander could hardly be more different from Athletes; but the slow, deliberate approach to movement and style was very clearly from the same creative mould.
Like the novelist who writes a best-seller first time out, whatever Kate Prince goes on to create in the future, she’ll always struggle to match the brilliance of her first full-length show - Into the Hoods...
Unlike Kylián, Weiss generally works from an overt storyline and her own libretto for Body Master is loosely based on the life of Gordon Craig, the English pioneer of modernist theatre...
This challenging programme presents three very different takes on modern dance, each rooted in the vernacular of India, then and now.
James Cousins is back at the Place in London after extensively touring his double bill inspired by Haruki Murakami's book "Norwegian Wood". 11 months on Graham Watts looks at the show afresh...





