It's not often these days you get a bill that couples a brand-new piece by Christopher Bruce with something by Darshan Singh Bhuller. Sadly neither of these choreographic heavyweights has been as active in UK dance as they were formerly and this program reminds us of what we have been missing.
Reviews
Reviews of Dance and Ballet Performances
Half the pleasure of watching Sacred Monsters on this, its final tour, is of course enjoying the penultimate opportunity to watch the ultimate ballerina of our age take the stage.
Royal Ballet Don Quixote London, Royal Opera House 25 November 2014 Gallery of pictures by Dave Morgan www.roh.org.uk New directors of old ballets are often tempted to make them relevant to today by stripping away dated conventions and substituting new ones: earthy peasants, drunken party-goers, crazed hallucinations in place of visions. Carlos Acosta has not gone too far in his 2013 version of...
This two-part bill, my first introduction to James Cousins’ work, could hardly have left me with a more positive impression of the young choreographer,
The stars were indeed aligned when American Ballet Theatre’s Gillian Murphy arrived to guest with the Australian Ballet for two performances as the leading lady, Nikiya the temple dancer.
This is a musical that will certainly delight all dance lovers: the theme of ballet permeates the show from start to finish.
Baltic Dance Theatre have just presented two Netherlands inspired nights of dance with local premieres by Izadora Weiss (director), Jiri Kylian and Patrick Delcroix. Graham Watts with a comprehensive report...
By the end, I felt our journey of discovery had involved driving down one of those long, straight, interminable cross-American highways, with nothing but the same prairieland in view.
Company Chameleon take a long hard look at what it means today to be a man (or maybe that should be what it means to be a bloke) in Beauty Of The Beast.
The idea behind the triptych is to show three aspects of the company’s style: the classicism and character dance of Petipa; the technical pizzazz of mid-twentieth-century Soviet dance, the eccentricities and atmospherics of contemporary movement...
All up NMC pulled another interesting night out the bag and easy to see why they have been nominated (as Best Independent Company) in this years National Dance Awards.
At my first performance, Ashley Ellis was a first-rate Odette/Odile, giving a nearly flawless performance. (I’m assuming that flawless performances transpire only in Heaven or some other extraterrestial locale.)
But, for the ballet to work it has to be danced with conviction and joy, and this is what the Mikhailovsky pulls off marvelously well.
The choreography is determined by the need for co-operative effort in manipulating unpredictable swathes of fabric – a metaphor for mankind’s attempts to control the forces of nature
...it’s only a rehearsal first appeared over a decade ago and has since become Ina Christel Johannessen’s international calling card...
The Place’s adventurous four-day Currency Festival aims for the quirky in its mix of dance and circus acts from across Europe...
Osipova’s vitality is astonishing: the minute she stepped onstage, it’s as if the whole world became a few shades brighter...
Eight paragraphs of praise and I haven’t yet mentioned Alina Cojocaru! My advice to anyone yearning to see the special beauty of ballet is simple: take any chance you can to see Cojocaru dance.
The programme was so underwhelming that I went twice in succession, to see whether alternative casts could make a difference.
...AM I is a thematic magpie, shifting from the macro to the micro and back again in its exploration of the nexus of religion and science.