All you need is love
What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe…
Dying of the light
It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the…
Walking with cadence
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
The long goodbye
There’s been a clutch of middle-aged danseuses taking leave of life in one way or another recently. We’ve seen the…
Woolf haul
People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe…
Boys on the march
In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo…
Lethal weapon
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
Crossing cultures
For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877…
Monky business
We ballet-goers may be the most self-deceiving audiences in theatre. Put a ‘new work’ in front of us and half…
A master of miniatures
On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in…
50 shades of beige
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Swan’s way
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
Down and out
The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious…
Jugglers v. dancers
January is something of a palate-cleanser for the year, as the London International Mime Festival flies in plane-loads of companies…
Let the wrong one in
There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan…
S’wonderful
A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places,…
No brainer
One feels the pang of impending failure whenever the Royal Ballet ventures like a deluded Don Quixote into a periodic…
Dance One last dance
I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…
Mademoiselle Non
On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Mis-en-Mars
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Surviving the Soviets
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Boys alone
GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of…
