Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is currently at the San Francisco Ballet preparing for the American premiere of his Cinderella. He has a rehearsal in forty-five minutes so we quickly set off to discuss his latest full-length ballet and many other things...
Tag - Frederick Ashton
Rawsthorne was painted by André Derain and Pablo Picasso, and later by Francis Bacon. She was the inspiration for Alberto Giacometti’s etiolated sculptures of walking figures...
While I wasn't wowed by the closer, as I left I couldn't stop talking about the Bhuller and Gable and wishing to see major companies put them both on in full. That and the usual thought: Another year, another fine night from Ballet Central - well done all.
Working backwards from the title song that ends Two Cigarettes in the Dark, it’s possible to discern a theme in Pina Bausch’s 1985 piece...
But it was Rojo who really surprised me, with the most emotionally open performance I've ever seen from her. ...a swansong, indeed: what a way to go!
36 pictures by Dave Morgan...
Closing the program is Kurt Jooss’s anti-war ballet from 1932,The Green Table, one of the greatest pieces of choreography ever created and still relevant after more than 80 years.
Lynette Halewood with her personal selection of London dance memories this last year...
The festival was as intensive as ever, with three performances running on seven days, four on one day, some concurrently. The range and quality of dance overall was impressive.
The middle piece, O Zlozony/O Compsite, is a beautiful work by Trisha Brown, made for the company in 2004. Bizarely it always reminds me of Ashton's Monotones...
As a young partnership Delia Mathews and Tyrone Singleton really are exceptionally good.
As Clement Crisp wrote after Darrell’s death: ‘His ballets are true and fascinating mirrors of their age’. Timing a revival is always tricky. Would we want to see his Beatles ballet, Mods and Rockers (1963), again?
What would he himself make of this book, I wonder? He'd be amazed, I should think, by the amount of detail he'd find, and possibly surprised by some of it...
The Honors are America’s highest award for those whose creative triumphs influenced and enhanced American culture. This is a celebration of their outstanding careers and extraordinary talents and appreciation of their unyielding commitment and contribution to the arts.
On the eve of the Clive Barnes Foundation announcing its annual awards we interview Valerie Taylor-Barnes, the great critics widow, about her life in dance (including the Royal Ballet) and the work of the Foundation...
Well, performing for me is really about that experience of giving to the audience. In the studio you work and perfect things, you collaborate with your partner, but for me it’s about what happens on the stage, the ability to give something, to your partner, to the audience.
...I’m not certain in which direction the company is headed. There is so much potential to be realised that it would be disappointing to see it ebb away.
After the urban angst of Infra, Fool’s Paradise concludes the evening on a sigh of pleasure. This triple bill is proof indeed that contemporary ballet is alive and thriving.
The programme included works both old and new but it was not an altogether successful mixture. The dancers looked most at home, and at their most sleek and impressive, in Faster, a work made on them this year by their Artistic Director, David Bintley, evoking the striving of competitors in the Olympics.
And in the next act she (Nunez) did just that, giving us one of the best Odiles I remember seeing. She looked as if bamboozling innocently trusting princes was her favourite thing in the world, the most fun she’d ever had...