★★★★✰ Ronald K. Brown is one of those choreographers who returns to a similar mode in piece after piece, so it’s easy to take him for granted. But what a powerful mode it is.
Reviews
Reviews of Dance and Ballet Performances
★★★★✰ This was indeed a Giselle to treasure as a first encounter with ballet.
★★★✰✰ Duwane Taylor's "It's Time to Speak"... is powerful theatre that left a lump in many of our throats at the end.
★★★★✰ There are some extremely demanding physical comedy routines incorporated into Lebensraum. Even some of the throwaways are wince-inducing...
★★★★✰ Mother was an absorbing 70 minutes of performance art. Mothers were never exactly to the fore and yet – in many respects – they were always apparent...
★★✰✰✰ The efforts of San Francisco Ballet’s artists are sadly misplaced in this largely joyless and wholly unsatisfying rendition of The Sleeping Beauty.
★★★★✰ After much tumult over the holidays, New York City Ballet has begun its first post-Peter Martins season. If you’re just catching up, the company’s “ballet master in chief” – ie artistic director – of over thirty years retired on New Years Day, in the midst of an investigation into allegations of physical abuse and sexual harassment.
★★★★✰ Before heading to the premiere of Kristin Damrow & Company’s EAMES, which mines the life, work and relationship of legendary designers Ray and Charles Eames, some background research seemed a good idea...
★★★★✰ Maillot’s work is generally replete with a sense of irony and eroticism and Shakespeare gave him enormous scope for both!
★★★★★ Peter Wright's 1985 production for the Royal Ballet has had many interpreters, all subtly or extravagantly different. Nunez is amongst the finest, a perfectionist who seems realistically earthy as a country girl who loves dancing and ethereal as her defiant spirit.
★★★★★ Ballet de Lorraine have reconstructed Relâche, a fascinating work first performed by the Ballets Suédois in 1924-25. It had caused almost as great a scandal as the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring in the same Théâtre des Champs-Elysées...
★★★✰✰ 2018’s edition of the festival boasted over two hundred artists performing fifty-five pieces. The Festival is committed to welcoming a range of performing experience, from new faces to seasoned veterans, students to professionals...
★★★★✰ One great privilege of Rojo being both director and dancer must be the opportunity to choose her own partners and this year’s returning guest is Ivan Vasiliev...
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ Peter Wright's glorious ballet might not shine quite so magically in its Bintley/Albert Hall version but the dancers certainly do...
★★★★✰ Kobborg has deconstructed the work; mixing up the narrative’s building blocks before reassembling them in a masterpiece of balance that remains recognisably traditional but is also refreshingly new.
★★★★★ Of all the shows I've seen this year this probably had the least dance content and yet as a package it really delivers on the wonder and thoughtful difference that theatre can make to all our lives. Charmed I was...
★★★✰✰ While the production is supremely stylish and the characters well-observed with expressive and romantic choreography, the narrative is padded out in order to fill the music, particularly where traditional elements of "Cinderella" have been excised.
★★★✰✰ I’ve seen The Christmas Ballet five times over the years and it has always been and continues to be a lovely, celebratory afternoon or evening at the theatre. That said, I still struggle with the format.
★★★★★ As artistic director of her own troupe, Farrell was able to take her devotion to Balanchine and her aspiration to promote and preserve his legacy to a new level. For nearly 20 years, Washington audiences have enjoyed an annual mini-festival of Balanchine’s works...