The million-dollar question for any dancer on the cusp is this: can they carry an evening-length story ballet? The answer, on the evidence of Copeland’s début in Romeo and Juliet, is yes.
Tag - Kenneth MacMillan
The final triple bill of the Royal Ballet’s season reverts to its founder’s faith in classical ballet as an expressive language.
Gallery by Dave Morgan...
Les Rendezvous is 21 minutes of classical movement perfection, but Alexander Whitley comes surprisingly close to besting it with his 20-minute more modern take on ballet - Kin.
American Ballet Theatre know how to do a Gala and this was their 75th Anniversary as well - Everybody seemed to have a good time says Marina Harss...
Woolf Works is a chimera, an illusory creation made up of disparate elements...
Kay’s cast all look real, raw, anxious and laser sharp, ready for action...
Margaret Willis has just been in St. Petersburg, catching up with the Dance Open Festival and also visiting the Vaganova Academy where she had some words with director Nikolai Tsiskaridze...
What you get with the Jasmin Vardimon brand is an intense physical approach to dance and the JV2 dancers have assimilated this physicality with gusto.
Choreographed by artistic director Helgi Tomasson in 1994, the ballet is popular with audiences here and makes a satisfying coda to his thirtieth-anniversary season...
It’s a truism that any startlingly new dance-maker without an early elite training will have based his (or her) choreography on their own physique...
Gallery by Dave Morgan...
IMHO, there is no better story-telling choreographer around today....
The gala opened with the Act III wedding pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty, performed by Ekaterina Osmolkina and Guiseppe Picone. No fish-dives in this version – the Russians regard them as vulgar, and Osmolkina could never be vulgar.
Both Royal Ballet premieres, one by Kim Brandstrup, the other by Liam Scarlett, were surely keepers, bound to be seen again.
The programme was so underwhelming that I went twice in succession, to see whether alternative casts could make a difference.
Ondiviela has established himself as a choreographer on a bigger scale than before, though still in need of an outside eye as he goes freelance. And he has found a future star in Olivia Cowley.
The word transcendent gets tossed around a lot, overused, especially in the performing arts. But if one performer deserves it at this year's Fall For Dance Festival, it is Aakash Odedra.
Gillian Lynne has made Helpmann and Benthall's wartime collaboration into a gutsy dramatic ballet, probably with more choreography than Helpmann attempted.
Birmingham Royal Ballet – La Fin du jour, Miracle in the Gorbals, Flowers of the Forest – Birmingham
See these thoughts as a heads up and, ultimately, encouragement to Londoners to go and see an interesting bill...