★★★✰✰ 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...
Reviews
Reviews of Dance and Ballet Performances
★★✰✰✰ It started sedately enough, with the three men and three women emerging in stretchy black dresses...
★★★★✰ The second programme commemorating the 25th anniversary of Kenneth MacMillan’s death revealed his very different responses to music, and to human nature.
★★★✰✰ The program opened and closed with the most recent works: Jessica Lang’s Her Notes and Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Both premiered at ABT in 2016, and both are works whose inspiration largely comes from their scores.
★★✰✰✰ Beautiful, calming imagery is not in the vocabulary of Anatomie.
★★★★✰ The ENB production of La Sylphide has been staged by three luminaries of Danish ballet, Frank Andersen, Eva Kloborg and Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, and is, therefore, one supposes, as authentic to the August Bournonville ideals, as possible...
★★★★★ ...the dancing is life enhancing and the audience leaves on a high of pleasure.
★★★★✰ 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.
In the first of the mixed bills celebrating Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets, 25 years after his death, "Le Baiser de la fée" intrigued me because the questions it posed about his development as a choreographer...
★★★✰✰ Since its creation 140 years ago, La Bayadѐre has been one of the Mariinsky Ballet’s calling cards and the Russian company can make this enduring classic shine in all its stylistic glory and theatrical splendor.
★★★✰✰ In between the speeches and the short films came the dancing. The main attraction was the new Ratmansky work, Songs of Bukovina...
★★✰✰✰ ...an intriguing idea inflated into unwieldy modern dance-theatre.
★★★✰✰ I caught all four new works: an expanded version of Michelle Dorrance’s Myelination, Kyle Abraham’s Drive, the Sara Mearns and Honji Want collaboration No. 1, and Mark Morris’s solo Twelve of ‘em for David Hallberg.
★★★★✰ Absolutely fascinating... Scottish Ballet should feel very proud of celebrating MacMillan in such a thoughtful way...
★★★✰✰ Binet’s aspiration is that audiences should see beautifully trained dancers in a spiritual light, embodying Lawren Harris’s quest for the divine in nature.
★★✰✰✰ The best moments in The Toad Knew are comic, but there aren’t enough of them. Old-fashioned clowning is sprinkled throughout the production...
★★★★★ The words “90 minutes, no interval” generally fill me with dread.
★★★★✰ ...the line between performer and viewer hovers in a delicious state of ambiguity, steeped in porousness.
★★★★✰ There has to be something in Canada’s water, especially in the beautiful city of Québec...
★★★✰✰ Origami is a work for a solo performer and a shipping container which slowly unfolds and reconfigures itself over forty minutes.