★★★★✰ The second programme commemorating the 25th anniversary of Kenneth MacMillan’s death revealed his very different responses to music, and to human nature.
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.
★★★★★ ...the dancing is life enhancing and the audience leaves on a high of pleasure.
In the first of the mixed bills celebrating Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets, 25 years after his death, "Le Baiser de la fée" intrigued me because the questions it posed about his development as a choreographer...
★★✰✰✰ ...an intriguing idea inflated into unwieldy modern dance-theatre.
★★★✰✰ Binet’s aspiration is that audiences should see beautifully trained dancers in a spiritual light, embodying Lawren Harris’s quest for the divine in nature.
Karen Kain, Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Canada, on celebrating Canada's 150th with a joint work that includes NBoCanada and Royal Ballet dancers in a unique London Docklands event on the 12/13 October... that and lots more
★★★★✰ Gloria was Nixon’s first choice because he felt it showed MacMillan at his moving best. It contrasts Poulenc’s choral setting of the Latin text from the mass in praise of God with the toll of human lives in the First World War.
★★★✰✰ Each performance of Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography will be different, since its composition is to be determined by an algorithm based on his genetic code. ...whatever a reviewer describes will never be the same again.
Scottish Ballet will be performing Kenneth MacMillan’s "Le Baiser de la fée" as part of the celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of his death. It will be the first revival of the ballet in 30 years - Jann Parry on the return of an important work.
★★★✰✰ Wheeldon and his scenarist, Nicholas Wright, have made theatrical sense of a nonsensical children’s classic. This Alice, though, is a modern pantomime, not a classic ballet.
★★★★✰ The physicality of 5 Soldiers during the hour-long performance brings home the breaking of bodies...
★★★★✰ From the moment Kimin Kim enters with a flourish as Solor in Act I of La Bayadère, we know we’re in for a treat.
★★★✰✰ When Maya Plisetskaya commissioned a Carmen-based ballet from Alberto Alonso, co-founder of the National Ballet of Cuba, she wanted to shake up Soviet ballet conventions...
★★★★✰ Tereshkina and Kim match well physically and temperamentally. She has a lovely high-flying arabesque line and a wide range of slow and fast turns, small and expansive movements.
★★★★✰ The highlight of the second half of the programme was Mats Ek’s Pas de Danse, staged by his assistant, Pompea Santoro.
★★★★✰ It was a well-balanced programme, featuring different kinds of discipline for future corps de ballet dancers, and honouring veteran choreographers as well as contemporary ones.
★★★★✰ Both are pre-existing ensemble works, the performers virtually anonymous on stage, though named on cast sheets: the company is the star, not the soloists.
★★★★✰ In Marguerite and Armand the 3 casts reviewed are Zenaida Yanowsky and Roberto Bolle, Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli, Natalia Osipova and Valdimir Shklyarov.
★★★★✰ In between the comically incompetent turns – strongmen who can’t lift, a snake charmer who cheats – come poignant dance numbers.
★★★✰✰ Morris is not the man to create a Beatles tribute show, choreographing 1960s dance routines to the original songs. Instead, he commissioned an hour-long score from Ethan Iverson...