Ballet
Bird brained
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent…
Ménage à trois
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
West End wannabe
The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at…
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
Giselle has floored many a ballerina — it did so again last week
English has all sorts of emotive metaphors for how we feel about the ground. We’re floored. Or well grounded. Or…
Fighting talk
If there’s one thing scarcer than hen’s teeth in serious choreography nowadays, it’s a light heart. When was the last…
Martian moves
Every August when London dims, Edinburgh calls, promising nothing less than ‘the greats of the arts’ at the International Festival.…
Afterthoughts
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…
Pulp fiction
Hot, languorous, sizzling… I was thinking what an ideal show Matthew Bourne’s noir comedy is to watch on a summer’s…
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…
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…
Messy genius
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…
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…
50 shades of beige
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
Swan’s way
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
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…
S’wonderful
A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places,…
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…
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
Tarts and Tchaikovsky
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
