Wheeldon has two problems to contend with in Cinderella: Prokofiev’s prescriptive score and Ashton’s definitive choreography from 1948...
Author - Jann Parry
A long-established dance writer, Jann Parry was dance critic for The Observer from 1983 to 2004 and wrote the award-winning biography of choreographer Kenneth MacMillan: 'Different Drummer', Faber and Faber, 2009. She has written for publications including The Spectator, The Listener, About the House (Royal Opera House magazine), Dance Now, Dance Magazine (USA), Stage Bill (USA) and Dancing Times. As a writer/producer she worked for the BBC World Service from 1970 to 1989, covering current affairs and the arts. As well as producing radio programmes she has contributed to television and radio documentaries about dance and dancers.
Madame Butterfly is one of Nixon’s most effective narrative productions, combining japonaiserie with classical ballet conventions...
The programme stretches and shows off the young graduates to good advantage in a well-chosen assortment.
Weiss is taking Baltic Dance Theatre on a journey that needs to be seen outside as well as inside Poland.
The final triple bill of the Royal Ballet’s season reverts to its founder’s faith in classical ballet as an expressive language.
Ben Duke opens his one-man show disarmingly by losing his place in his copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost...
Rambert’s repertoire, under Baldwin’s direction, continues to divert and instruct in its combination of classic revivals and bold commissions.
Woolf Works is a chimera, an illusory creation made up of disparate elements...
...d’avant is the collaborative work of four dancers-singers-creators: Sidi Larbi Charkaoui, Damien Jalet, Luc Dunberry and Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola. Waltz herself is not credited in the programme...
Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette reduces Shakespeare’s poetic play to a graphic novel, illustrating every emotion in bold outlines.
Jann Parry talks to Laura Morera and Vadim Muntagirov about all things La Fille mal gardée and a few other things too...
Auf dem Gebirge comes from her gloomy period, when she was more concerned with the imagery her performers could dig out of themselves than with their abilities as dancers.
According to Carlson’s programme note, the lemons represent segments of challenge and confrontation...
My People is a mature work, developed in close collaboration with the composers, that deserves to be widely seen.
It’s a truism that any startlingly new dance-maker without an early elite training will have based his (or her) choreography on their own physique...
The opening and closing pieces showed how skilfully Cohan responds to dancers whose training and experience are very different from the Graham-based technique on which he drew for many decades.
To celebrate his 20th year as artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, David Bintley has revived the first work he created in the post – Carmina burana...
Heralding the celebrations of Robert Cohan’s 90th anniversary year Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s enterprising company, founded in 2009, is touring a programme, Figure Ground, containing two of his works.
The gala opened with the Act III wedding pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty, performed by Ekaterina Osmolkina and Guiseppe Picone. No fish-dives in this version – the Russians regard them as vulgar, and Osmolkina could never be vulgar.
Both Royal Ballet premieres, one by Kim Brandstrup, the other by Liam Scarlett, were surely keepers, bound to be seen again.