New Adventures – Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet – London
★★★✰✰ Our setting is the Verona Institute in the near future. Here disturbed young people have been locked up for an opaque purpose under the eye of a sadistic jailer… A traumatised Juliet meets a troubled Romeo, and it ends as badly as you might expect.
Lost Dog – Juliet & Romeo – London
★★★★✰ Juliet and Romeo is a clever work on many different levels.
English National Ballet – Cinderella – London
★★★★✰ A spectacular show, full of colour, humour and romance…
American Ballet Theatre – Gala with The Seasons premiere + Ratmansky Trio bill – New York
★★★★✰ It’s impossible not to be impressed by the range of these works, from introspective and conversational (Symposium) to brilliantly classical (The Seasons) to dramatic (Dnieper).
5 Questions to choreographer Ruth Brill, about to unveil ‘Peter & The Wolf’ for Birmingham Royal Ballet
We quickly catch up with choreographer Ruth Brill about her latest work for BRB, how she creates and what else she is up to… she’s a busy bee!
New York City Ballet – Balanchine, Robbins & Reisen quad bill – Washington
★★★✰✰ Opus 19 feels at once nostalgic, mysterious and dreamy…
Royal Ballet – Frankenstein – London
★★✰✰✰ Could Liam Scarlett’s monstrous Frankenstein be fixed with more, better surgery? Evidently not, in this revival, three years after its creation.
Scottish Ballet – Cinderella – Edinburgh
★★★★✰ The cast I saw at the first performance of this year’s Christmas touring season were the best (Ugly) Step-Sisters I’ve ever seen – take a bow Constance Devernay and Aisling Brangan.
Didy Veldman, Choreographer and Umanoove Director
Didy Veldman’s Umanoove are about to tour her latest work – The Knot – an examination of the social and personal significance of marriage in contemporary Western society. Diane Parkes has a word about the work and what makes Veldman tick
Natalia Osipova – ISADORA: A Tribute to Isadora Duncan in Two Acts (world premiere) – Costa Mesa
★★★✰✰ Half-narrative and semi-abstract, ISADORA hop-skips through the dancer’s life; it’s described in the program notes as a “freely interpreted biography,” and it cherry-picks around unsavory elements…
Les Etés de la Danse, Paris – Jerome Robbins Homage, Programme 2 – Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Perm Opera Ballet
★★★★✰ It’s been a very enjoyable homage to Robbins’s versatility…
Birmingham Royal Ballet – Romeo and Juliet – London
★★★★✰ It was a fine team performance from the company but particular honours go to Momoko Hirata’s Juliet who let us know what she was thinking and feeling at every moment.
Royal Ballet / Charlotte Edmonds – Piggy in the Middle, Sink or Swim – London
★★★✰✰ Piggy in the Middle is, in part, Edmonds’ tribute to Kenneth MacMillan, the 25th anniversary of whose death has been marked during the Royal Ballet’s 2017/2018 season.
San Francisco Ballet – Robbins: Ballet & Broadway quad bill – San Francisco
★★★★✰ There’s nothing like watching a woman crush a man’s neck with her thighs to make you go hmm, maybe that whole #MeToo thing has legs.
Washington Ballet – Romeo and Juliet – Washington
★★★✰✰ A strikingly beautiful ballerina, with a lissome body and expressive features, EunWon Lee is an ideal Juliet…
Lost Dog – Juliet and Romeo: A Guide to Long Life & Happy Marriage – London
★★★✰✰ Ben Duke’s speciality, in the works he devises for Lost Dog, the company he founded in 2004 with Raquel Meseguer, is conflating high art with low life – epic literature with everyday banalities.
New York Theatre Ballet – Beethoven/1999, Optimists, Dark Elegies, Double Andante – New York
★★★✰✰ All was danced with the quiet focus, lucidity, and unfussy delivery that characterize the company. No attention-grabbing fireworks…
New Adventures – Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella – London
★★★✰✰ While the production is supremely stylish and the characters well-observed with expressive and romantic choreography, the narrative is padded out in order to fill the music, particularly where traditional elements of “Cinderella” have been excised.
Washington Ballet – Les Sylphides, Le Corsaire pdd, Bolero, Prodigal Son – Washington
★★★★✰ It was a pleasure to see this company in such a smart and wide-ranging program. It was even more rewarding to see the Washington Ballet dancers masterly navigating the numerous challenges…
Mikhailovsky Ballet – Cinderella – St. Petersburg
★★★★★ It seems appropriate that I’ve travelled to Russia to find a Cinderella interpreter of movement and spectacle to match up to the genius of Prokofiev’s music.
