The Royal Ballet – The Cellist (premiere), Dances at a Gathering – London
★★★✰✰ 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…
Royal Ballet – Frankenstein – London
★★✰✰✰ Could Liam Scarlett’s monstrous Frankenstein be fixed with more, better surgery? Evidently not, in this revival, three years after its creation.
Interview: Mayara Magri, First Soloist, The Royal Ballet
Jann Parry talks to the recently promoted Mayara Magri at an important time – she is about to make her debut as Gamzatti in The Royal Ballet’s production of La Bayadere – her first major and leading role in the company she joined 6 years ago…
Royal Ballet – Mayerling (Bonelli, Morera) – London
★★★★✰ The partnership in Mayerling between Morera and Bonelli is a fine example of how experience can illumine the nuances of a dramatic ballet.
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…
Royal Ballet – Obsidian Tear, Marguerite and Armand, Elite Syncopations – London
★★★★✰ The ostensible link between the three works in this mixed bill is that they are by the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographers, past and present: Frederick Ashton. Kenneth MacMillan and Wayne McGregor. But none is typical of the choreographers’ work…
Royal Ballet – Manon – London
★★★★✰ It’s a myth that Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon was ever regarded as a failure. Critics may initially have had reservations but audiences have enjoyed it from its first season in 1974 throughout its many revivals…
Royal Ballet – Bernstein Centenary: Yugen, The Age of Anxiety, Corybantic Games – London
★★★✰✰ Leonard Bernstein wrote (in 1949): “I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.’ Many choreographers have taken up the challenge, though his quasi-metaphysical musings have usually eluded them: dance is more corporeal than music.
Gallery – Royal Ballet in Bernstein Centenary triple bill incl new McGregor & Wheeldon
The Bernstein Centenary bill includes new works by Christopher Wheeldon (Corybantic Games) and Wayne McGregor (Yugen). Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety completes the bill. Gallery by Dave Morgan…
Russian Ballet Icons Gala 2018 – London
★★★✰✰ This year’s Russian Ballet gala was ostensibly in honour of the 200th anniversary of Marius Petipa’s birth. Any choreography attributed to him was mostly a long way ‘after Petipa’, but it’s always fun to see excellent Russian dancers deliver pas de deux from Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Le Corsaire.
Royal Ballet – Giselle – London
★★★★★ 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.
Memorable Performances of 2017 – London
Head and shoulders above other new work this year was Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet…
Royal Ballet – Sylvia – London
★★★★✰ Sylvia makes a welcome return to the repertoire, reacquainting dancers and audiences with Ashton’s sensibility and complex choreography. It’s a joy but not a masterpiece, as he well knew…
Royal Ballet – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – London
★★★✰✰ Wheeldon and his scenarist, Nicholas Wright, have made theatrical sense of a nonsensical children’s classic. This Alice, though, is a modern pantomime, not a classic ballet.
Royal Ballet – The Winter’s Tale – Brisbane
Royal Ballet The Winter’s Tale ★★★★✰ Brisbane, Queensland Performing Arts Centre Gallery of pictures (Apr 2014, London) by Dave Morgan 5 July 2017 www.roh.org.uk www.qpac.com.au From his choreography for the dance movie, Centre…
Royal Ballet – Woolf Works – Brisbane
★★★★✰ For the Royal Ballet, there could not have been a better start to their Australian tour than Ferri’s performance as Clarissa Dalloway in the first act of Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works.
Royal Ballet – 3 casts in The Dream, Symphonic Variations, Marguerite and Armand – London
★★★★✰ In Marguerite and Armand the 3 casts reviewed are Zenaida Yanowsky and Roberto Bolle, Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli, Natalia Osipova and Valdimir Shklyarov.
Royal Ballet – Symphonic Dances (premiere), The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, Tarantella, Strapless – London
★★★★✰ Symphonic Dances is Scarlett’s farewell portrait of Yanowsky. Like her, the ballet is big and bold, beautiful and elusive.
Royal Ballet – Flight Pattern (premiere), After the Rain, The Human Seasons – London
Flight Pattern: ★★★★★, After the Rain: ★★★✰✰, Human Seasons: ★★✰✰✰. Like Gorecki, Crystal Pite has created a memorable and moving work full of meaning…
