Natalia Osipova – Pure Dance bill – New York
★★★✰✰ So, is Pure Dance a success? It depends on what you’re looking for. Osipova is as exciting, and as powerful, a dancer as ever. Among the commissions, only Valse Triste and Flutter are worthy of further exploration…
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…
Royal Ballet School & Royal Ballet – The Cunning Little Vixen, The Two Pigeons – London
★★★★✰ – Royal Ballet School in Liam Scarlett’s new Cunning Little Vixen. ★★✰✰✰ – Royal Ballet’s Yasmine Naghdi debut in Two Pigeons.
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.
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…
La Scala Ballet – Giselle and Don Quixote – Brisbane
★★★★✰ Nicoletta Manni’s performances in Don Quixote and Giselle on the last three days of Teatro alla Scala ballet company’s season in Australia was extraordinary, not just for her stamina and resilience, but her acting skills.
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…
American Ballet Theatre – La Bayadère – Los Angeles
★★✰✰✰ …watching La Bayadère can feel like observing an artifact stuck in another era, and indicates the need for a conversation about what a contemporary, forward-thinking repertoire should look like.
National Ballet of Cuba – Giselle – Saratoga Springs
★★★✰✰ Ultimately, the best thing about Alonso’s Giselle is that it’s danced by Cubans, and that’s good enough for me.
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.
American Ballet Theatre – Giselle – New York
★★★★✰ Roberto Bolle, who played his usual striking Albrecht, responded to Seo with nuance and subtlety. The same goes for how Seo revealed Giselle’s madness…
American Ballet Theatre – 3 Bills: Giselle, Gala, Firebird/Afterite – New York
★★★★✰ After a week of Giselle, during which Natalia Osipova and David Hallberg had their much-awaited re-match, the company began its season in earnest on May 21, with a spring gala that included two new works and excerpts from a third…
English National Ballet’s Emerging Dancer 2018 Competition – 5 Questions to 6 Finalists
English National Ballet’s Emerging Dancer Competition is unique in British ballet in throwing the spotlight on more junior dancers or “tomorrow’s stars” as ENB put it. This year’s competition is on the 11 June and ahead of the that we talk to the finalists – Precious Adams, Fernando Carratalá Coloma, Giorgio Garrett, Daniel McCormick, Francesca Velicu and Connie Vowles…
Interview: Melissa Hamilton, First Soloist, The Royal Ballet
“I knew that I had to seize my only chance to have a ballet career. Masha Mukhamedov agreed to teach me privately six days a week for ten months…”
Interview – Annabelle Lopez Ochoa on creating Guernica for SF Ballet’s Unbound Festival
“I don’t know if we can make the world a better place, but we can definitely have the audience think about it.”
English National Ballet – Akram Khan’s Giselle – on cinema release
★★★★★ A total of 150 cinemas will show the ballet, which was filmed at the Liverpool Empire, in October 2017
Dada Masilo / The Dance Factory – Giselle – New York
★★★✰✰ Masilo’s is an uncompromising, ritualistic version of the story, with little room for redemption, and in its final scene, in which the spirits amass and advance upon Giselle’s seducer again and again, it tips over into a kind of animistic brutality…
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.
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.
