★★✰✰✰ Akram Khan’s UK premiere of Outwitting the Devil is an exasperating puzzle. Opaque hints of mythological narrative offer challenges to the viewer; but it also contains some beautiful, sculptural moments and gorgeously fluent, liquid moments.
Author - Lynette Halewood
★★★★✰ "Uttarayan, a kite festival from Gujarat in northern India, is the inspiration for Kattam Katti... It’s cheering right now to see something celebratory and good-humoured, and the audience adored it."
★★★✰✰ All Jose Agudo tells us is that he has drawn on Prosper Merimée’s novella. But the operatic version casts a long shadow in our minds...
★★★★✰ the company pulled off an uplifting performance with energy and charm.
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?
★★★★✰ 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...
★★★★✰ Deluxe by BalletBoyz can be seen online on Sadler’s Wells Facebook Premieres from Friday 27 March, 7.30pm for one week only, and upcoming on BBC Four for BBC Culture in Quarantine (date tba).
★★✰✰✰ Rambert dancers on stage perform with great energy and commitment but the whole thing doesn’t manage to live up to its ambitious objectives...
★★★★✰ It’s not the kind of work that will persuade anyone that ballet can be a subtle, nuanced and poetic art, but it is cracking entertainment and a treat in a dreary month.
Lynette Halewood with some reflections on London dance performances over the last year - the good and the less good...
★★★✰✰ Mavin Khoo doesn’t appear on stage here: the work has been made on dancers from the Temple of Fine Arts Inner Space Dance, based in Malaysia.
★★★★✰ This is a thoughtful and nuanced depiction of how complex and fraught identity can be in Britain today, put across with meaty, muscular force by two charismatic performers.
★★★★✰ ...exemplary performances from Momoko Hirata as Giselle and César Morales as Albrecht make for a richly rewarding and moving experience.
★★★✰✰ 'Another Look at Memory' is a cool, precise, rigorous piece, set to Philip Glass’s choral work 'Another Look at Harmony'', finding a language in dance and gesture which responds to, and reflects on, the music’s minimalism.
★★★★✰ It’s another remarkable achievement from Maliphant, conjuring poetry out of a bare stage, light and movement.
★★★★✰ A charismatic and compelling performance and a forensic examination of embattled masculinity, holding the attention throughout with unflagging energy.
★★★★✰ Falling Man is a huge achievement, performed with intensity and charisma, and we really need to see it again in our theatres.
★★★✰✰ Our setting is the Verona Institute in the near future. Here disturbed young people have been locked up for an opaque purpose under the eye of a sadistic jailer... A traumatised Juliet meets a troubled Romeo, and it ends as badly as you might expect.
★★★✰✰ Dutch National Ballet Junior Company at the ROH Young Talent Festival with 5 works – No Time Before Time, Fuse, What Got You Here, Fingers in the Air and In The Future.
★★★✰✰ The twelve dancers are a mix of nationalities, attractive, lively and energetic, fortunately possessing the stamina required to get through a demanding programme.