At least there are some memorable performances to recall from 2021: at the beginning of the year none of us had any idea when we might sit in a theatre and watch live dance again...
Tag - Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
★★★✰✰ With works from Yuri Possokhov (Senseless Kindness), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Laid in Earth), Stina Quagebeur (Take Five Blues), Russell Maliphant (Echoes) and Arielle Smith (Jolly Folly)
★★★★✰ This is very much a film: though it is based on an earlier Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui work 'When I’m Laid in Earth', its dreamlike tone and unnerving effects owe much to Thomas James’s imaginative camerawork and his interest in the supernatural...
Lynette Halewood with some reflections on London dance performances over the last year - the good and the less good...
★★★★✰ It’s thrilling to see the building confidence of Carlos Acosta’s Cuban-based dance company. There’s a sense of cohesion, shared purpose and a unique identity drawn from a vibrant range of influences.
★★★✰✰ Absolutely first rate dancing with rather mixed choreography...
★★★★★ This is a superbly made film... It draws a portrait of a supreme artist, a woman with exceptional humility, all sensitively handled with warmth and humour.
★★★✰✰ A very mixed bill... Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Medusa (★★✰✰✰), Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour (★★★★✰) and Crystal Pite's Flight Pattern (★★★★✰)
Works by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Christopher Wheeldon and Crystal Pite. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★★✰ The tableaux recall Francis Bacon paintings – and Goya in his darkest moments.
★★★★✰ For a very short while, Wim Vanlessen will enjoy the claim that he has performed for the Royal Ballet Flanders for more than half its existence. The company celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, later this year and Vanlessen joined in 1994. This performance was both a celebration of exceptional long service and a farewell...
Semperoper Ballett Dresden were another new visitor in the summer, with a programme of Forsythe works, some not seen here before. But Forsythe is a theme this year in himself.
★★★★✰ Noetic was created in 2014 for the company by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui working with his frequent collaborator sculptor Antony Gormley.
★★★★✰ Sidi Larbi Cherkaouis’s work is full of surprises. Icon, first premiered in 2016 is another fruitful collaboration between Anthony Gormley and Cherkaoui in which clay moulds both the theme and the dancers.
★★★✰✰ There was a lot here to enjoy. This may have been a celebration of three decades in dance, but there was no nostalgia here...
"That’s what it’s always been about for me – the necessity to connect with an audience and express myself."
★★✰✰✰ Cherkaoui looks older than his years, so much so that his relationship in Play with Shivalingappa risks being unsettling. As dancers, they are no longer equals, as they must have been in 2008.
★★★✰✰ 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...
★★★★✰ The title is oblique, but the choreography is an explicit punch of intensity, fusing vigour and angularity with a velvety slinkiness.
★★★★★ It still has the power to surprise and delight – and let the imagination fly.