![2Faced Dance Company's promotional image for the EVERYTHING [But the Girl] triple bill.© Chris Nash. (Click image for larger version)](https://dancetabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cn-everything-3bill-promo-image_360.jpg)
★★★✰✰ This triple bill marks 2Faced Dance Company’s 20th anniversary. EVERYTHING [but the girl], presents two new pieces alongside a reworked number from 2011...
Author - Sara Veale
★★★★★ Think comic opera meets dance theatre, with choreography so animated there’s no translation needed.
★★★★✰ Dorrance Dance boast crisp technique and a sharp-witted approach that catapults tap way beyond its show-biz associations.
★★★★✰ A gleaming triptych of imaginative and remarkably demanding choreography. The production is textured in every aspect, plumbing deep wells of emotion and revelling in a multiplicity of tones, tempers and movement styles.
★★★✰✰ As with most retellings, Liping’s centres on a young woman destined to dance herself to death. However, the dancemaker has invoked Buddhist principles, including the concept of reincarnation...
★★★★✰ All ten pieces on show were strong, considered commissions, and more than half came from female choreographers – a heartening boost for this male-saturated field.
★★★✰✰ It's the spring and Ballet Black has just premiered its latest triple bill. It included new works by Sophie Laplane and Mthuthuzeli November, the former engagingly light and the latter movingly heartfelt...
★★★★✰ Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman has picked a rich subject to mine in The Knot: marriage in all its starry-eyed, nerve-wracking, life-altering glory.
★★★★✰ Rambert’s latest programme is a night of hellos and goodbyes, marking the debut of the company’s new standalone junior faction, Rambert2, as well the final performance of a repertory favourite, Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances.
★★✰✰✰ Matthias Sperling’s Now That We Know explores a long-running preoccupation of dancemakers and academics alike: how performance invokes and reflects the mind-body connection.
★★★★✰ Pascal Dusapin’s dance opera Passion is a minimalist affair. There are no ornate sets or costumes, no crowds of characters or elaborate plotlines to consume them. Instead we’re presented with a snapshot of two anonymous lovers...
★★★✰✰ Both pieces are demanding and elicit some impressively stylish moments, though there’s a fair amount of unevenness...
★★★★✰ Velvet Petal is Darkin’s latest work for the company, created in 2017 after she read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970s.
★★✰✰✰ The dancing feels surprisingly lifeless given the fiery potential of the subject matter. Instead of engaging with the text’s furious, pitiful laments, it gives the impression of simply occurring alongside them...
★★★★✰ The title is oblique, but the choreography is an explicit punch of intensity, fusing vigour and angularity with a velvety slinkiness.
★★★✰✰ Violence lurks in every corner of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, from supernatural malevolence to visceral carnage. Mark Bruce’s new take on the production taps into classic horror tropes to animate this force...
★★★★✰ The pairing cannily indulges our need for vivid material on these bleak mid-winter nights while also steering us down from the high of the Christmas circuit, with its sugary Nutcrackers and other family-friendly fare.
★★★✰✰ One of the ballet’s biggest departures from tradition is having the same dancer play Clara and the Sugar Plum Fairy. The reasoning is unclear, but Kase proves versatile enough to pull it off...
★★✰✰✰ The opening scene of The North, a new dance theatre work from Dundee-based troupe Joan Clevillé Dance, starts with a scene plucked straight from a Scandi noir...
★★★✰✰ Aladdin never fully finds its feet, but there’s a lot to like about the show, from the cheery group numbers to the striking visuals.