★★★★✰ Marina Harss with thoughts/observations on La Valse, Other Dances, After the Rain pas de deux, Agon, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, Movements for Piano and Orchestra and Chaconne.
Tag - Chopin
★★★✰✰ Starstruck is subtitled "Gene Kelly's Love Letter to Ballet" - it's a ballet about jazzy dancing fizz and if that connects with us then its work is really done.
★★★★✰ Jann Parry reviews the RB Balanchine and Robbins bill featuring Apollo, Tchaikovsky pas de deux and Dances at a Gathering.
★★★★✰ 8th March at Sadler's Wells was the last time we were able to see Richard Alston's work performed by his own company of dancers. Jann Parry with a full and perceptive review of Alston's latest work and last company show.
★★★✰✰ In The Cellist, Cathy Marston has taken on a challenging subject for her first commission for the Royal Opera House stage: the real-life story of a much-loved musician Jacqueline Du Pré...
★★★★✰ It’s another remarkable achievement from Maliphant, conjuring poetry out of a bare stage, light and movement.
★★★✰✰ Robbins’ response to Chopin (in Dances at a Gathering) is also extraordinary: sensitive, simple, vulnerable, direct, un-fussy.
★★★★✰ Three short but densely packed ballets infused with a strong Russian flavour were at the heart of the Royal Ballet’s last bill of the season.
Meaghan Grace Hinkis, the Royal Ballet soloist, is about to make her debut as Vera in Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country”. 5 quick questions about that and her dancing life…
★★★✰✰ There was virtually nothing to fault with "In the Night" on Saturday — each couple was well matched, and Robbins’ unique capacity to imbue classical form with the richness of human experience again seems unparalleled
★★★★✰ Now that we are all one more Nutcracker nearer death, as weary critic Richard Buckle used to bemoan, the Royal Ballet has given us a wintry bonne bouche of ballets to savour.
★★★★✰ On the second night the program was offered, Mearns was stunning, but the remaining three pieces, by three different companies were, to varying degrees, engaging, although hers was a tough act to follow.
Jann Parry talks to The Royal Ballet about what's happening on World Ballet Day this year and just what it means for some of those involved... Kristen McNally, James Hay and Assistant director Anthoula Syndica-Drummond.
★★✰✰✰ After viewing Ashton on a bill with works by Ricardo Graziano and Christopher Wheeldon, I’m not worried about Ashton’s relevance nor his resonance with a future audience. ...Both the Graziano and Wheeldon posed some problems from what some might consider a “female” perspective.
★★★★✰ It’s been a very enjoyable homage to Robbins’s versatility...
★★★★✰ The programme, performed by two very different American ballet companies, displayed Robbins’s versatility while revealing the similarities in his approach to music.
★★★✰✰ But, at least to my eye, the production’s triumph is its final lakeside act. There, the formations of swans, as originally choreographed by Lev Ivanov, become intricate, delicate, lyrical, and intensely moving.
★★★★✰ An hour in the company of Nikki and JD is well spent.
★★★★✰ Even in stillness, Taylor dancers hold immense power in their bodies, the energy potential within them more nuclear than solar.
★★★★✰ There’s nothing like watching a woman crush a man’s neck with her thighs to make you go hmm, maybe that whole #MeToo thing has legs.