★★★★✰ The 2021 Royal Ballet School Summer Show, on the Royal Opera House Main Stage, was a different affair to normal with many of the White Lodge Junior School students physically absent because of Covid restrictions. But there was much to celebrate and lots of new work on display too...
Tag - Prokofiev
Jann Parry with some thoughts on the Darcey Bussell gala to raise funds for British Ballet and featuring Ballet Black, Birmingham Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, New Adventures, Northern Ballet, Rambert2, Scottish Ballet and The Royal Ballet.
★★★★✰ Balanchine's "Prodigal Son", staring Daniel Ulbricht and Teresa Reichlen, has just been streamed by NYCB - Jann Parry, who also watched the recent Inside NYCB coaching video of 'Prodigal', puts an important work in context...
★★★✰✰ Wheeldon has woven a lot of narrative threads into his ballet spectacular.
★★★✰✰ There were parts I adored and elements that didn’t resonate as much.
Trey McIntyre talks to Claudia Bauer about creating "The Big Hunger" for San Francisco Ballet - to some particularly devilish Prokofiev it explores the little and big hungers of life and is premiered this week, on 13 February 2020.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ Juliet and Romeo is a clever work on many different levels.
★★★★✰ A spectacular show, full of colour, humour and romance...
★★★★✰ 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).
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!
★★★✰✰ Opus 19 feels at once nostalgic, mysterious and dreamy...
★★✰✰✰ Could Liam Scarlett's monstrous Frankenstein be fixed with more, better surgery? Evidently not, in this revival, three years after its creation.
★★★★✰ 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'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
★★★✰✰ 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...
★★★★✰ It’s been a very enjoyable homage to Robbins’s versatility...
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ 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.