★★★★✰ / ★★★★★ If there have been better examples of substantial dance films made during these trying times then I have yet to see them.
Reviews
Reviews of Dance and Ballet Performances
★★★★★ Choreographers (Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Didy Veldman, Andrew McNicol) and performers are providing us with amazing records of what they can achieve in the strangest of times.
★★★★✰ Rooms2020 retains Sokolow’s intensely expressive choreography, which makes it a striking documentation of the aloneness and alienation that can pervade this time of pandemic.
★★★✰✰ Wheeldon has woven a lot of narrative threads into his ballet spectacular.
Dutch National Ballet, under director Ted Brandsen, have made a splendid response to COVID-19, streaming 8 new digital dances in the last 3 months. Graham Watts on many interesting and absorbing works, varying from ★★✰✰✰ to ★★★★★
★★★✰✰ Wayne McGregor’s first full-length creation for the Royal Ballet, Woolf Works, inspired by Virginia Woolf, remains one of his best works to date.
★★★★★ What we are fortunate to be able to witness in these constrained times is an intimate record of otherwise fleeting performances by exceptional artists.
★★★★✰ Indigo is one of those dances that doesn’t seem totally abstract, yet doesn’t follow a linear path either. It’s more about concept and emotions. Layers and extremes. Just like the colour indigo itself.
★★★★✰ The singers had the lions' share of the concert, with just two pas de deux by Royal Ballet couples, Matthew Ball and Mayara Magri, Reece Clarke and Fumi Kaneko.
★★★★✰ The recording reveals how unusual the choreography is, as it was in 1965... Dancers in pointe shoes have to adapt to flexed feet, flat-footed parallel positions, torsos bent forward, elbows and wrists held at angles.
With one common factor, music by Igor Stravinsky, Scottish Ballet (SB) deliver two excellent and very contrasting performances which were filmed at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh in 2017.
★★★★★ Though the concert was a treat, could the Royal Opera House please try raising our spirits in future streamings, and give the Royal Ballet the prominence it deserves.
★★★★★ If you want an antidote to any miserable lockdown mood, La Fille mal gardée cannot fail to lift your spirits and allow you to marvel at some really first-rate dancing.
★★★✰✰ Giselle was the first full-length classical ballet that Arthur Mitchell's company of black American dancers would perform. He thought there would be no point in their pretending to be Rhineland peasants, so decided to set the 19th century ballet in pre-Civil War Louisiana.
★★★✰✰ The first concert was not much of a consolation for all that we have lost. So far, the Royal Ballet appears a token add-on to the opera's contributions...
★★★★★ Dormeshia’s And Still You Must Swing is the first online dance that made me want to write about it. I knew it would be good...
★★★★✰ Cathy Marston has achieved much in bringing the life of Jacqueline du Pré to the ballet stage and perhaps one of the things that becomes even clearer with repeated viewings, is that the music and the dance are inextricably linked.
★★★✰✰ I do wonder why ENB chose this particular (acceptable but sometimes subdued) recording to stream, when we are all suffering from live performance withdrawal symptoms and this company so often produces spectacular performances, sending audiences away in raptures.
★★★★✰ Osipova inhabits the role of Anna Anderson with gruelling sincerity. She appears deranged from the beginning with close-up camera angles revealing a depth of despair that is tremendously affecting.
★★★✰✰ No lockdown for Annabelle Lopez Ochoa who has just choreographed "Where do the birds go?" over five Zoom sessions with Norwegian National Ballet's Francois Rousseau and Julie Gardette in their Oslo living room...