★★★★✰ Tchaikovsky’s music for The Nutcracker may be played ad nauseam in shops and public spaces over Christmas, but the ballet for which he wrote it is the real deal – especially in this production.
Tag - Yuhui Choe
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet's current production of The Sleeping Beauty, dating back to 2006, is a homage to Ninette de Valois and her faith that Marius Petipa's Imperial Russian ballet should be the flagship of her British company.
★★★★★ With Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov... Theirs was a performance that caught up everyone in the sheer pleasure and excitement of spectacular dancing.
★★★★✰ Now that we are all one more Nutcracker nearer death, as weary critic Richard Buckle used to bemoan, the Royal Ballet has given us a wintry bonne bouche of ballets to savour.
★★★★✰ In the past, the Royal Ballet's version, last performed five years ago, has sometimes seemed insubstantial. Not so this time, with a luxury cast in full dramatic mode: Vadim Muntagirov, Marianela Nuñez, Natalia Osipova and Gary Avis...
★★★★✰ It's a myth that Kenneth MacMillan's Manon was ever regarded as a failure. Critics may initially have had reservations but audiences have enjoyed it from its first season in 1974 throughout its many revivals...
★★★★✰ Elite Syncopations: Dancers from all five major British ballet companies took part, some doubling up roles in identical outfits so that identifying dancers was confusing. The stand-out solo in both the casts I saw was to the Calliope Rag, Monica Mason’s original role...
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet’s away-day to Hull, this year’s UK Capital of Culture, was dramatic in its scale: 17 pieces presented over three hours...
We talk to Emma Maguire about the Gala that honours the life of her mum, Ann Maguire, and this year takes place at the Leeds Grand Theatre on 3 September. The proceeds go to support the Ann Maguire Arts Education Fund - inspiring young people through the arts...
An all Frederick Ashton bill. Gallery by Dave Morgan...
★★★★✰ “Thank you, Carlos,” boomed one audience member as Acosta ended his performance by changing out of his dance gear, sitting meditatively on stage...
Yuhui Choe and Valentino Zucchetti cast. Gallery by Dave Morgan.
★★★★✰ Lamb's mad scene is all the more effective by starting as though she’s a broken porcelain doll, uncomprehending. She retreats into her herself in disbelief at Albrecht’s treachery.
Acosta deserves every moment of his standing ovation...
These are dancers worth following in a wide repertory of works; it’s a shame to see them go while feeling we’ve barely gotten to know them better.
After an absence of eleven years, the Royal Ballet has finally returned to New York; they’re currently presenting two programs at the Koch Theatre,..
The final triple bill of the Royal Ballet’s season reverts to its founder’s faith in classical ballet as an expressive language.
It’s a truism that any startlingly new dance-maker without an early elite training will have based his (or her) choreography on their own physique...
Royal Ballet Don Quixote London, Royal Opera House 25 November 2014 Gallery of pictures by Dave Morgan www.roh.org.uk New directors of old ballets are often tempted to make them relevant to today by stripping away dated conventions and substituting new ones: earthy peasants, drunken party-goers, crazed hallucinations in place of visions. Carlos Acosta has not gone too far in his 2013 version of...
Jann Parry reviews Scènes de ballet, Five Brahms Waltzes, Symphonic Variations and A Month in the Country...