★★★★✰ The annual ballet gala organised by Olga Balakleets and Ensemble Productions was deferred to the end of this year because of coronavirus restrictions. Fortunately, invited dancers from European countries were able to travel before the latest measures were imposed...
Tag - Le Corsaire
★★★★✰ the company pulled off an uplifting performance with energy and charm.
★★★★★ One of many striking things about Marcia Haydée’s production of The Sleeping Beauty is that although it premiered on 10 May 1987, it still looks fresh and current and could have been created within the last couple of years.
★★★★★ Thank you, Royal Ballet, for giving so much pleasure in trying times.
★★★★✰ Kevin O'Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, came on stage to welcome the return of a paying audience for what turned out to be the opening and closing live performance of the season...
English National Ballet’s Emerging Dancer Competition is unique in British ballet in throwing the spotlight on more junior dancers or "the excellence of the Company’s young talent,” as ENB put it. This year’s competition is live-streamed from ENB's London studios on 22 September and ahead of the that we talk to the finalists – Ivana Bueno, Carolyne Galvao, Miguel Angel Maidana, Victor Prigent...
★★★★✰ The annual Icons gala provides the chance to see dancers who don't often appear in London...
★★★★✰ 'Spellbound' delivered in every regard – opulent grandeur, terrific people watching and above all, marvelous dance.
★★★★✰ It’s not the kind of work that will persuade anyone that ballet can be a subtle, nuanced and poetic art, but it is cracking entertainment and a treat in a dreary month.
★★★✰✰ This three-act three-hour-long Paquita is a brainchild of Smekalov, who is a second soloist with the company. He wrote his own libretto, largely borrowing from the Cervantes novella La Gitanilla...
★★★★✰ Days after the performance, I cannot get James Whiteside’s Ali out of my head. Devon Teuscher’s Medora is charming and warm, pulling off triple fouettées turns and her Italian fouettées with aplomb...
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet did themselves a lot of good with the last new bill of the season - a one-off celebration of Margot Fonteyn. There was much to be reminded of and be proud of.
★★★★★ "I cannot recall being so moved at a dance performance for a very long time, if ever."
★★★★★ The Trocks' version of Swan Lake (or Lac, as it used to be known) restores some Soviet era removals. Benno, the hero's best friend and supporter, is back, as are mime sequences, mostly mystifying the participants...
★★✰✰✰ ...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.
For the first time, English National Ballet's competition for its junior members was held in the capacious London Coliseum, where the company has been performing The Sleeping Beauty...
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ Kobborg has deconstructed the work; mixing up the narrative’s building blocks before reassembling them in a masterpiece of balance that remains recognisably traditional but is also refreshingly new.
So how did a good Chilean boy end up dancing ballet in Europe...
★★✰✰✰ ...an intriguing idea inflated into unwieldy modern dance-theatre.