Dance
Hello, goodbye
Ballet lovers driven square-eyed by a drip feed of livestreaming and archive footage have been pining for the patter of…
Rhapsody in blue
When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans…
Sprinting in the sand
Dancing at Dusk captures the final rehearsal of a new version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. It’s only…
Eroticism and ecstasy
Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed…
Catastrophe
At the outset of lockdown I gave you my list of top mustn’t-watch films — that is, the ones that…
Uplift
If eight weeks in lockdown have brought out my baser impulses (biscuits by the sleeve, total renunciation of waistbands), it’s…
Versailles lockdown
A few years ago I interviewed an eminent baroque conductor. Prickly and professorial, tired after a day of rehearsals, he…
Georgia on my mind
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…
The stuff of nightmares
It must have been hard for Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young to live up to the success of 2016’s devastating…
Hair down in a sea of chignons
The January dance stage can be a site of naked contrition. Like a tippler grasping at green juice after a…
Chilling: Arthur Pita’s The Little Match Girl at Sadler’s Wells reviewed
Did your feet twitch? That’s the test of The Red Shoes. Did your toes point? Your ankles flex? Your arches…
Unsettlingly faithful to the spirit of Schiele: Staging Schiele reviewed
‘Come up and see my Schieles.’ Those were the words that ended a friend’s fledgling relationship with an art collector.…
A last dose of vitamin D before the clocks go back: Royal Ballet’s triple bill reviewed
Were those gerberas in Francesca Hayward’s bouquet on opening night? Gentlemen admirers take note: no woman, ballerina or otherwise, has…
Manon can be magnificent, this one was merely meh
Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country…
Nothing sings and shimmies like Alvin Ailey
Hit them with your best shot? Or save the best till last? Almost 30 years after Alvin Ailey’s death in…
Daffy charm and diabolo tricks: Bolshoi’s The Bright Stream reviewed
The Bright Stream is a ballet about a collective farm. Forget everything you know about collectivism — the failed harvests,…
Silly but stellar: Bolshoi Ballet’s Spartacus reviewed
It’s togas-a-go-go as the Bolshoi bring Yuri Grigorovich’s 1956 ballet Spartacus to the Royal Opera House. Oh dear, I did…
The extraordinary life of 104-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer
It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one…
Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets is a revelation
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is full of music and movement. The players, such as they are, slip, slide, shake, tumble,…
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s #MeToo Medusa is a bad hair day from Hades
Medusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and…
Merce Cunningham’s work was magical, intangible, Einsteinian – revival is futile
On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance…
Electrifying: English National Ballet’s She Persisted reviewed
‘Where was the Kahlo brow?’ asked my guest in the first interval of English National Ballet’s She Persisted, a triple…
A masterclass of menace and magnificence: Romeo and Juliet reviewed
Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in…
Still far from perfect but chaps will like it: Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein reviewed
Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with…
Almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise: Northern Ballet’s Victoria reviewed
Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could…
