★★★★✰ Lauren Lovette has just said farewell to NYCB. Marina Harss on some moving performances - "The ovation was heartfelt, and went on for a long time."
Tag - Prokofiev
Both the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are opening their 2021/22 seasons with the same ballet - Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Jann Parry takes a look at how one of the most admired narrative ballets of the 20th century came to be and details of the many dancing debuts we can look forward to...
★★★✰✰ All up this is a most thoughtful and involving R&J for our time, one that with some dramatic honing will have a long life and which can speak powerfully to both new and old audiences. It's a dance of consequence, as ever, from Rosie Kay.
★★★★✰ 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...
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...