★★★★✰ Royal Ballet School at the ROH Young Talent Festival with a mixed bill of over 10, new and old works...
Tag - Swan Lake
★★★★★ 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.
★★★✰✰ As with most retellings, Liping’s centres on a young woman destined to dance herself to death. However, the dancemaker has invoked Buddhist principles, including the concept of reincarnation...
I was at the recent Critics’ Circle lunch when Carlos Acosta won his latest award and was struck by Graham Watts citation - it seemed to splendidly sum up Carlos, both the man and his illustrious career... and why exactly we all admire him. BM, Ed.
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…
★★✰✰✰ Could Liam Scarlett's monstrous Frankenstein be fixed with more, better surgery? Evidently not, in this revival, three years after its creation.
★★★★✰ - Royal Ballet School in Liam Scarlett's new Cunning Little Vixen. ★★✰✰✰ - Royal Ballet's Yasmine Naghdi debut in Two Pigeons.
★★★★✰ The entire cast is committed to the MacMillan idea of everyone having their own character and story, and the result is a richly detailed picture of the conflicts between poverty and wealth, love and lust.
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.
★★★★✰ Matthew Bourne has reworked his famous "Swan Lake" and it's now touring. Graham Watts wrestles with iconic and uber definitions in a long look at a much-loved work.
The Dance Section of the Critics’ Circle is pleased to announce the nominations for the 19th National Dance Awards…
★★★✰✰ If The Unknown Soldier is dispiritingly low-key, Wayne McGregor's Infra remains assertively bold...
★★★★✰ In the last several years, the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has developed a sideline to his main choreographic efforts: the reviving of ballets by Marius Petipa in a way that represents the original choreography with as much fidelity as possible...
★★★★★ The Trocks' version of Swan Lake (or Lac, as it used to be known) restores some Soviet era removals. Benno, the hero's best friend and supporter, is back, as are mime sequences, mostly mystifying the participants...
★★✰✰✰ Although the first night audience was moved to a standing ovation, Swan Lake can and should be so much more than this stylised ritual...
Next month - September - The Trocks open their 2018 UK tour which runs through to November and covers many towns and cities across the land. A good primer on all things Trockadero as Diane Parkes speaks to Raffaele Morra, whose been with the company these last 17 years...
★★★★✰ Devon Teuscher has done her time, and the results are breathtaking...
★★★✰✰ But, at least to my eye, the production’s triumph is its final lakeside act. There, the formations of swans, as originally choreographed by Lev Ivanov, become intricate, delicate, lyrical, and intensely moving.
★★★★✰ This show defied the norm: a counter-intuitive observation about a spin-off from the archetypal routine of a Saturday evening institution that millions of us watch with our feet up.
★★★★✰ Harlequinade is pure entertainment, a work of art whose entire raison d’être rests on its charm and stylishness. If you require that your art contain deeper meanings, read no further...