English National Ballet – Akram Khan’s Giselle – London
★★★★★ Everything about this production is topical, very real and will probably be so for many years to come. Absolutely five stars to the company…
Yang Liping – Rite of Spring – London
★★★✰✰ As with most retellings, Liping’s centres on a young woman destined to dance herself to death. However, the dancemaker has invoked Buddhist principles, including the concept of reincarnation…
Royal Ballet – Within the Golden Hour, Medusa, Flight Pattern – London
★★★✰✰ A very mixed bill… Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Medusa (★★✰✰✰), Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour (★★★★✰) and Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern (★★★★✰)
National Dance Company Wales – Awakening: Tundra, Afterimage, Revellers’ Mass – London
★★★✰✰ It’s quite a mixed evening. The standout item is the final piece, Revellers’ Mass by the company’s resident choreographer, Caroline Finn.
Royal Ballet Flanders – Fall, Chronicle, Boléro – Antwerp
★★★★✰ For a very short while, Wim Vanlessen will enjoy the claim that he has performed for the Royal Ballet Flanders for more than half its existence. The company celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, later this year and Vanlessen joined in 1994. This performance was both a celebration of exceptional long service and a farewell…
Akram Khan Company – Until the Lions – London
★★★★✰ As an almost abstract dance work Until the Lions is outstanding, a spectacular collaboration between dancers, musicians, designers and technicians.
Memorable Performances of 2018 – London
Semperoper Ballett Dresden were another new visitor in the summer, with a programme of Forsythe works, some not seen here before. But Forsythe is a theme this year in himself.
Birmingham Royal Ballet – Autumn delights: La fille mal gardée & The Nutcracker – London & Birmingham
★★★★✰ I look forward to the changes inevitably coming to BRB, but I can’t believe any new director will turn their back on such repertoire gems as La fille mal gardee and their Peter Wright Nutcracker.
Sujata Mohapatraa and Gauri Diwakar at Darbar 2018 – Adventures in Odissi and Kathak – London
★★★★✰ The evening allowed us to observe the differences between the expressive delicacy of the Odissi storytelling and the more expansive and speedy space-devouring moves of Kathak. Each had its distinct flavour with different qualities to enjoy.
2018 National Dance Awards – Announcement of Nominations
The Dance Section of the Critics’ Circle is pleased to announce the nominations for the 19th National Dance Awards…
Royal Ballet – The Unknown Soldier (premiere), Infra, Symphony in C – London
★★★✰✰ If The Unknown Soldier is dispiritingly low-key, Wayne McGregor’s Infra remains assertively bold…
Le Patin Libre – Threshold – London
★★★★✰ If there is a major difference between Le Patin Libre of 2014 and now, then surely it lies in this merger of these skaters’ extreme skills with the same elite capability in their artistic collaborators.
English National Ballet – Lest We Forget bill – London
★★★★★ “I cannot recall being so moved at a dance performance for a very long time, if ever.”
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa – Play – London
★★✰✰✰ Cherkaoui looks older than his years, so much so that his relationship in Play with Shivalingappa risks being unsettling. As dancers, they are no longer equals, as they must have been in 2008.
Dance@TheGrange – Curated by Wayne McGregor & Edward Watson – Grange Festival, Hampshire
★★★★✰ McGregor’s company dancers (in Bach Forms) brought a surging energy, buoying up jewel-like moments from the Royal Ballet stars…
Gallery – Akram Khan Company in Portraits in Otherness
Works by Ching-Ying Chien, Maya Jilan Dong, Dickson Mbi, Joy Alpuerto Ritter. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Akram Khan Company – Xenos – London
★★★✰✰ Xenos, which apparently means “stranger” or, more aptly for this piece, “foreigner”, is a tangled mass of many things but, above all, it seems to be an essay on loneliness.
