Sweet nothings
Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling…
Turbo-charged Tiler
The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan,…
Best in show
Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that…
With added Spice
‘We hope you enjoy the performance,’ announced the Tannoy before the lights went down for How did we get here?…
Going like the clappers
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…
An honest doubter
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s…
Dazzling gems
The Koh-i-Noor in this Diamond Celebration of 60 years of the Friends of the Royal Opera House garnered the least…
Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler's Wells, reviewed
Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill…
Arts Council England and the war on opera
Instructed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to move money away from London and reassign it to…
One long moan of woe
I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised…
Flesh and fisticuffs
Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a…
National disasters
It is high time the Arts Council put ENO and ENB out of their misery, says Rupert Christiansen
Make mine a triple
Good, better, best was the satisfying trajectory of Northern Ballet’s terrific programme of three original short works, which moves south…
Dieu de la danse
I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a…
Saved from slim pickings
With the major companies largely on their summer breaks, the Edinburgh International Festival struggles to programme a high standard of…
A backward step
Sick though one may be of the way that the poison dart of ‘woke’ is lazily flung at what is…
Vive la gloire
The refurbishment of Paris’s galleries and museums continues apace, with money no object, finds Rupert Christiansen
Principle of Pan’s People
I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance…
Sweet nothing
How much weight of plot can dance carry? Balanchine famously insisted that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, and masters…
Tango traduced
Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might…
Cut and thrust
Sneer all you like at its prolixities and vulgarities but Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling remains a ballet that packs an exceptionally…
Tornado Tamara
One wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Tamara Rojo. The most fearsome figure on the British dance…
Man up
For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be…
Study in Scarlett
Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has…
Driven to abstraction
If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and…
