American Ballet Theatre – Jane Eyre – New York
★★✰✰✰ For all Marston’s qualifications, I found her Jane Eyre to be a dreary affair, theatrically dutiful and choreographically thin.
New York City Ballet – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – New York
★★★★✰ For Balanchine, Shakespeare’s characters are two-dimensional types, exemplary but wholly unreal. They are shadows in a shadow-play, representing this or that quality…
Jasper Conran, designer, on working in ballet with David Bintley and now Christopher Wheeldon
Jasper Conran is producing new designs for Christopher Wheeldon’s “Within the Golden Hour”, to be premiered by the Royal Ballet on the 8 May 2019. Jann Parry talks to Conran about the designs and his earlier and extensive work for David Bintley at Birmingham Royal Ballet…
Lost Dog – Juliet & Romeo – London
★★★★✰ What if the star cross’d lovers hadn’t died, but had run away, got married, had a child, reached middle age and hit a relationship crisis?
Ivan Putrov on his latest night of ballet – Against the Stream
Ivan Putrov’s latest project, Against the Stream, gets its premiere on Sunday 7 April 2019 at the London Coliseum. Jann Parry finds out all about it…
Ballet Black – The Suit, A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream – London
★★★★★ Another year and another terrific bill from Ballet Black, mixing two strong and sophisticated works from much sought after international choreographers. …one of the company’s finest nights.
Mark Bruce Company – Macbeth – London
★★★✰✰ Violence lurks in every corner of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, from supernatural malevolence to visceral carnage. Mark Bruce’s new take on the production taps into classic horror tropes to animate this force…
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.
Royal Ballet – The Winter’s Tale – London
★★★✰✰ The return of Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale in its third revival since 2014 brings newcomers to its many meaty roles. It also introduces new audience members to one of Shakespeare’s late plays, with its convoluted plot.
Nol Simonse and Christy Funsch – the beauty and ruin of friends, of bodies – San Francisco
★★★★✰ Choreographed by Nol Simonse, in collaboration with Christy Funsch, and performed by the incomparable pair, a myriad of ideas and themes were at play during the sixty-minute work. But one concept was particularly striking: time.
Bialy Teatr Tanca Izadory Weiss – Eros Thanatos – Warsaw
★★★★✰ Biały Teatr Tańca (it means White Dance Theatre), is a new vehicle for the work of the uber-talented choreographer, Izadora Weiss, a protégé of the great Jiri Kylian…
Royal Ballet – The Winter’s Tale – Brisbane
Royal Ballet The Winter’s Tale ★★★★✰ Brisbane, Queensland Performing Arts Centre Gallery of pictures (Apr 2014, London) by Dave Morgan 5 July 2017 www.roh.org.uk www.qpac.com.au From his choreography for the dance movie, Centre…
Birmingham Royal Ballet – Arcadia (premiere), Wink – Cheltenham
★★★✰✰ The South tour is particularly interesting this year because it features a new piece by Ruth Brill, a first artist within the company, and this is her first major commission.
James Cousins Company – Rosalind – London
★★★★✰ Cousins has made a bold, complex, intelligent and invigorating piece…
Birmingham Royal Ballet – Wink, The Moor’s Pavane, The Shakespeare Suite – London
★★★★✰ Wink, best seen from above, is a valuable addition to BRB’s repertoire. So is José Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane, created in 1949.
Birmingham Royal Ballet – The Tempest – London
★★★✰✰ Bintley has treated Shakespeare’s drama as a masque, full of spectacle, music and dancing, with elusive characters that are more allegorical than realistic. It doesn’t work as a narrative ballet because the sub-plots are too complicated…
Yorke Dance Project – Rewind Forward: Sea of Troubles, Self, Twilight, Lacrymosa, Untethered – London
★★★✰✰ Yorke Dance Project is unusual, among small modern dance companies, in its respect for musicality and for the demands it makes for skilled partnering.
David Bintley, choreographer and director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, on his latest work – The Tempest
David Bintley, director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, is a prolific choreographer and just about to unveil his latest full evening work – The Tempest. Graham Watts went to talk to him about a work, that after 30 years of consideration, has found its time and proper custom score…
