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…
New English Ballet Theatre – The Four Seasons, Remembrance – London
★★★✰✰ Both pieces are demanding and elicit some impressively stylish moments, though there’s a fair amount of unevenness…
Northern Ballet – The Kingdom of Back, Mamela…, The Shape of Sound – Leeds
★★★★✰ A good night of new work for Leeds coupling a rising star from outside with local and much-loved company talent.
5 Questions to Jenna Lee, freelance choreographer, on her creative world and working with New English Ballet Theatre…
We talk to Jenna Lee about her work – The Four Seasons – for New English Ballet Theatre’s autumn tour this September and October. That and about her wider choreographic practice…
Ashley Bouder Project – Red Spotted Purple, Duet, Alas, Symbiotic Twin, In Pursuit Of – New York
★★★✰✰ Bouder’s pick-up ensemble of eight, which she refers to as an arts collaborative, reflects her ideals. It is racially diverse; the choreographers include both men and women. Not all the choreographers are white. This should be par for the course, but it’s not.
Nederlands Dans Theater – Shoot the Moon, Woke up Blind, The Statement, Stop-Motion – London
★★★★✰ World-class dancers… it’s the dancers’ polish and power that raises all they do up another level.
Joss Arnott Dance – A Movement in 3, V, Rush – Bracknell
★★★✰✰ Strangely neither the Arnott website or the programme highlight or say much about why the company is all female. I’m not against single-sex companies and the BalletBoyz show how effective it can be… but it seems too restrictive a vision here.
Mariinsky Ballet – Carmen Suite, Infra, Grand Pas from Paquita – London
★★★✰✰ When Maya Plisetskaya commissioned a Carmen-based ballet from Alberto Alonso, co-founder of the National Ballet of Cuba, she wanted to shake up Soviet ballet conventions…
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.
BBC Young Dancer Award 2017
★★★★✰ Nafisah Baba is the BBC Young Dancer for 2017. The 20 year-old contemporary dancer from West London won the award with a diverse trio of dances that grew stronger through the rounds.
Royal Ballet – Woolf Works – London
★★★✰✰ The ballet’s narrative interest depends on the dancer, and both performers are magnificent – different in tone and physicality, though not markedly so.
SFDanceworks – Concerto Six Twenty-Two, Lickety Split, Joe & Ida, Portrait, Z – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ With this first season, Sofranko has proved himself a good curator of choreographic and dance talent, with a preference for loveliness in movement and movers.
National Youth Dance Company – In- Nocentes – London
★★★★✰ They say that the best cooks take the ingredients and do the least to them to create a magnificent meal, and that’s what Michael Keegan-Dolan has done…
Ave Maya Gala in Memory of Maya Plisetskaya – London
★★★✰✰ Every gala needs a revelation, and this one was provided by Sergio Bernal, a Spanish dancer who dominated the stage in an imperious farruca solo from Antonio’s flamenco version of The Three Cornered Hat…
New York City Ballet – Ash, This Bitter Earth, The Infernal Machine, Jeux, Paz de la Jolla – New York
★★★✰✰ Handsome to look at, with its film-noir lighting and flattering black 1940’s style dresses (by Marc Happel), Jeux nevertheless proves to be rather thin…
Daniil Simkin – INTENSIO – New York
Just before intermission Simkin included two film-and-performance works by Alexander Ekman. Simkin and the City, which went viral with the Internet-savvy dance crowd a couple of years ago, always gets a good chuckle.
Amy Seiwert’s Imagery – Traveling Alone, Starting Over at the End, Back To – New York
Amy Seiwert, a San Francisco-based choreographer, is gifted. For the last several years, she has held the position of Choreographer in Residence at Smuin Ballet, where she has arguably surpassed her mentor, the troupe’s founding father, Michael Smuin, in choreographic talent…
Amy Seiwert’s Imagery – SKETCH 5: Stirred Program – San Francisco
In the end, SKETCH is about the artists and their learning process, and it’s our good fortune that they share it with us in performance.
The Royal Ballet – Infra, Divertissements, The Age of Anxiety, The Dream, Song of the Earth – New York
These are dancers worth following in a wide repertory of works; it’s a shame to see them go while feeling we’ve barely gotten to know them better.
English National Ballet – Choreographics 2015 – London
Of the three Choreographics evenings to date I thought this was the best, with all the pieces feeling buffed-up, thought about and nobody making a huge wrong turn.
