★★★✰✰ This summer's showcase of English National Ballet School's students was the first under its new director, Carlos Valcarcel... The Wimbledon programme consisted of two creations by him, two by students, and excerpts from The Sleeping Beauty as a conclusion.
Author - Jann Parry
★★★★✰ It’s been a very enjoyable homage to Robbins’s versatility...
★★★★✰ The programme, performed by two very different American ballet companies, displayed Robbins’s versatility while revealing the similarities in his approach to music.
★★★✰✰ Semperoper's dancers distort the classical ballet line more than the Paris Opera Ballet's (or ENB's) and don't bother much with fifth positions or precise épaulement for Forsythe's endless tendus. They seem contemporary dancers rather than étoiles being outrageous.
For the first time, English National Ballet's competition for its junior members was held in the capacious London Coliseum, where the company has been performing The Sleeping Beauty...
★★★★✰ It's a better Sleeping Beauty than the Royal Ballet's, but it benefits enormously from a stellar performance at its heart, a reminder of how civilised ballet can be.
★★★✰✰ Brandstrup keeps so many options open that the narrative thread of Life is a Dream is hard to pin down, even if you have read the programme notes and mugged up the 1635 play of the same name.
★★★★✰ Was she passionate as well as imperious? Her own letters and poems suggest so: contemporary accounts by others are not to be trusted. Her position of power in turbulent times generated a lot of fake news...
★★★★★ Liam Scarlett has devised a visual and emotional treat for audiences, fully justifying Kevin O'Hare's faith in him as a director and choreographer.
"I knew that I had to seize my only chance to have a ballet career. Masha Mukhamedov agreed to teach me privately six days a week for ten months..."
★★★★✰ All credit to Viviana Durante (supported by Royal Ballet, Ballet Black and Scottish Ballet dancers) for contributing to the 25th anniversary of Kenneth MacMillan's death with recreations of his early work.
★★★★✰ The ostensible link between the three works in this mixed bill is that they are by the Royal Ballet's resident choreographers, past and present: Frederick Ashton. Kenneth MacMillan and Wayne McGregor. But none is typical of the choreographers' work...
★★★★✰ Altogether, a cunningly judged programme that shows off the company at its most engaging...
★★★✰✰ Piggy in the Middle is, in part, Edmonds' tribute to Kenneth MacMillan, the 25th anniversary of whose death has been marked during the Royal Ballet’s 2017/2018 season.
★★★★✰ It's a myth that Kenneth MacMillan's Manon was ever regarded as a failure. Critics may initially have had reservations but audiences have enjoyed it from its first season in 1974 throughout its many revivals...
★★★✰✰ Leonard Bernstein wrote (in 1949): "I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.' Many choreographers have taken up the challenge, though his quasi-metaphysical musings have usually eluded them: dance is more corporeal than music.
★★★✰✰ This year's Russian Ballet gala was ostensibly in honour of the 200th anniversary of Marius Petipa's birth. Any choreography attributed to him was mostly a long way 'after Petipa', but it's always fun to see excellent Russian dancers deliver pas de deux from Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Le Corsaire.
★★★★★ The Troth is a gripping experience of a shared heritage. It's convincingly told as a moving story of love and sacrifice, set in an all-too-familiar context of First World War horror seen through unfamiliar eyes...
February's masterclass, the fifth in the series, featured choreography from the start and end of Frederick Ashton's tenure as artistic director of the Royal Ballet, 1963-1969.
★★★✰✰ Ben Duke's speciality, in the works he devises for Lost Dog, the company he founded in 2004 with Raquel Meseguer, is conflating high art with low life – epic literature with everyday banalities.