Royal ballet
Losing the plot
If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s…
The female gaze
Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced…
Black magic
Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young…
Notes on a scandal
How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer…
Unforgettable fire
How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s…
Off the page
Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances…
Bird brained
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent…
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…
Gutted!
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. 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…
Lethal weapon
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
Monky business
We ballet-goers may be the most self-deceiving audiences in theatre. Put a ‘new work’ in front of us and half…
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…
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…
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…
Tarts and Tchaikovsky
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
Seasonal treats
There was a time when the term ‘world première’ was not as fashionable as it is these days. Great works…
