★★★✰✰ Pavement, from 2012, takes as its touchstone the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton’s hard-hitting coming-of-age drama...
Author - Siobhan Murphy
Siobhan Murphy is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor, based in London. Between 2005 and 2014 she was London Metro's arts editor. She also contributes to LondonDance and tweets sporadically at @blacktigerlily.
★★★✰✰ The director Suzie Willson plays well with our fascination with people-watching...
★★★✰✰ Peking opera’s blend of highly stylised acting, singing, music and movement is always a feast for the senses. The costumes are reason enough to watch in themselves...
★★✰✰✰ It started sedately enough, with the three men and three women emerging in stretchy black dresses...
★★★★✰ How many ways can you hear the same piece of music? This inspired programme by Lyon Opera Ballet suggested, with elegant simplicity, that there are as many ways to hear something as there are people to hear it.
★★★★✰ Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt’s all-male company are on sparkling form right now.
★★★✰✰ Belles-Lettres – a piece by NYCB’s Justin Peck, reworked for Acosta Danza – is a sweepingly pretty pieces for nine dancers, all floaty, gorgeous frocks and increasingly impassioned duets...
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet’s away-day to Hull, this year’s UK Capital of Culture, was dramatic in its scale: 17 pieces presented over three hours...
★★✰✰✰ The end of the world is here – let’s party. This, roughly, is the premise of Grand Finale, Hofesh Shechter’s latest wild and whirling work, in which he grapples with our apocalyptic times...
★★★★✰ Hoffalt brings an elegantly mature intelligence to the part... Laurretta Summerscales will leave a hole in the company when she takes her sabbatical next season...
★★★★✰ Walking into the American dancer/choreographer Trajal Harrell’s first ever performance exhibition is like falling down the rabbit hole into another dimension.
★★★✰✰ This is a project with serious intent – but it doesn’t always have the wherewithal to meet its grand ambition.
★★★★★ It’s utterly captivating, full of unexpected, joyous exuberance.
★★✰✰✰ The whirling speech is often hard to decipher – the dancers are always in motion, their words thrown at whoever is nearest, the acoustics are terrible, and their French accents are very heavy.
★★★★✰ The days run away like wild horses: The teeming vitality of this opening offers exuberant fun, as does the playfulness Collins adds to her source material...
★★★★✰ There’s an appealing simplicity to Jose Agudo’s first full-length company production.
★✰✰✰✰ It wants to be a seat-of-your-pants psychological chiller and a heartbreaking love story. It is neither.
★★✰✰✰ For western audience tastes, there is quite a heavy dose of melodrama in this Mulan – Matthew Ma’s overblown score of soaring strings ramps this up further.
★★★✰✰ If you like to keep an arm’s distance between you and the contemporary dance you’re watching, then Vera Tussing is probably not for you.
★★★★✰ Cousins has made a bold, complex, intelligent and invigorating piece...