There were wonderful performances by Ekaterina Borchenko and Leonid Sarafanov – dancers you would like to see a lot more of. But three works by the same choreographer was too much of the same dish on the menu.
Author - Lynette Halewood
Don’t expect big emotional highs and lows or deeply defined characters, just a clear narration of a story that everyone knows. So if we judge it on these terms how does it do?
Well, it isn’t ballet and it isn’t revolutionary but it is fun...
Lynette Halewood with her personal selection of London dance memories this last year...
This wasn’t Shiori Kase's debut in the role, but it was remarkably polished and complete for one so young.
It’s a very successful work that manages to combine the oblique with the direct and engaging, and is both funny and sharply observed.
Naharin is at his best when working with groups, particularly mixed groups or groups of men. There isn’t much that is gender specific in the work; women dance much the same steps as men and there is little male / female partnering. What there is looks oddly perfunctory.
The programme included works both old and new but it was not an altogether successful mixture. The dancers looked most at home, and at their most sleek and impressive, in Faster, a work made on them this year by their Artistic Director, David Bintley, evoking the striving of competitors in the Olympics.
The evening certainly demonstrated the admirable qualities of the SFB dancers: their hard-working, good-humoured, go-for-it approach and the range of different talents in the company. The goodwill they generate in the audience is remarkable. Here’s hoping they come back for a return visit soon.
It is a fabulous evening, funny, sexy and as fast paced as a thriller. This is Bourne’s finest and most inventive work.
It is a fine selection which illustrates the variety of the Royal’s heritage works, which must beg the question how well are they are danced now...
With every Bausch work some of the images and sketches stick in the mind and linger as the particular flavour of the piece, and these will vary for every audience member. For me, it was how tough it is being a woman in Nur Du.
The dancers of Danza Contemporánea de Cuba are a fabulously talented bunch and it’s a pleasure to see them back at Sadler’s Wells. It would be even more of a pleasure if all the choreography in their programme was the same quality as the dancing.
Rambert... offers a mix of new commissions with rarely-seen work from their archives. Some items had much more impact than others, though not necessarily the ones you might imagine from the programme.
In 1984 Fosythe's vocabulary was much more strongly rooted in ballet: though it is spikily aggressive and legs are flung upwards over beyond the perpendicular, it is not as twisted and distorted as it later became. It is cool, rigorous, fiercely disciplined and blazing with adrenalin.
But if some grasp of the narrative can be assumed rather than supplied, Wheeldon still needs to make us care about his characters. He does succeed in making Alice a warm-blooded, strong-willed character, and Lauren Cuthbertson works extremely hard in the role to give us a lively, resourceful and energetic heroine. Jack is less strongly drawn. Federico Bonelli is certainly handsome enough for any...
The production stands or falls by the strength of the central performances, and on this occasion we were fortunate indeed.