Sadler’s wells
Why are today’s choreographers so musically illiterate?
Most choreographers today have lost interest in using music as anything more than a background wash of colour and mood.…
The best thing Cathy Marston has ever done
The Royal Ballet has scheduled what – on paper at least – looks like one of the most dismally dull…
What a joy La Fille mal gardée is
The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates,…
Depressingly corny: Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, reviewed
It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a…
Exhilarating – but also exhausting: ENB’s The Forsythe Programme reviewed
The first time I saw the work of Trajal Harrell I stomped out in a huff muttering about the waste…
What a joy to see some Merce Cunningham again
How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the…
I’ve had it with Pina Bausch
My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago,…
Does Sadler’s Wells really need a lavish new building?
Arts Council England may be successfully clobbering the poor old genre of opera into the ground, but its sister art…
Deeply impressive and beautiful: Akram Khan’s Gigenis reviewed
After taking a wrong turn culminating in the misbegotten Frankenstein, Akram Khan has wisely returned to his original inspiration in…
I’m done with Hofesh Shechter
I think I’m through with Hofesh Shechter, and that’s a pity, because earlier work of his such as Political Mother…
Expressive and eloquent: Northern Ballet’s Three Short Ballets reviewed
Ballet companies have become dismally timid about exploring their 20th-century heritage: everything nowadays must be either box-fresh new or a…
How claims of cultural appropriation scuppered an acclaimed new ballet
On 14 March 2020 I was at Leeds Grand Theatre for the première of Northern Ballet’s Geisha. The curtains swung…
Welcome back to London City Ballet – but can they please change their name?
There’s sound thinking behind this summer’s resuscitation of London City Ballet – a medium-scale touring company popular in the 1980s…
Arresting and memorable: Compagnie Maguy Marin’s May B reviewed
Samuel Beckett was notoriously reluctant to let people muck about with his work, so it’s somewhat surprising to learn that…
Snapshots from the edge
This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly…
Flesh and fisticuffs
Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a…
Tango traduced
Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might…
Man up
For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be…
To have and to hold
When you take in the richness of a Pina Bausch production — the redolent staging, the eloquent, eccentric twists of…
All that pizazz
Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy…
From Russia with love
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. The ballet wasn’t always considered quite such a box of delights
Sleeker than its scrappy parts
The Barcelona-born choreographer Joan Clevillé has form for off-beat storytelling with a streak of sincerity. Before becoming artistic director of…
There will be blood
Like musical supergroups and Olympic basketball teams, ballet galas tend to prize individual gifts over group cohesion. A recent one…
Just the ticket
Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked…
