Northern Ballet – The Kingdom of Back, Mamela…, The Shape of Sound – London
★★★✰✰ The works offer strong contrasts between the traditional story-telling strength of Northern Ballet and more abstract thematic dance.
Royal Ballet School – ROH, Young Talent Festival, mixed bill – London
★★★★✰ Royal Ballet School at the ROH Young Talent Festival with a mixed bill of over 10, new and old works…
Yorke Dance Project – Twenty: Playground, Between and Within, Communion, Imprint – London
★★★★✰ By swelling the numbers of her small touring company, Yolande Yorke-Edgell was able to mount a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Playground and a 10-strong ensemble for Robert Cohan’s Communion. The programme also included new works by Sophia Stoller and Yorke-Edgell herself.
Russian Ballet Icons Gala 2019 – London
★★★✰✰ The annual Ballet Icons gala, now in its 14th year, aims to promote Russian culture while providing a Sunday evening’s entertainment for Russians in London and ballet-lovers…
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.
