Sadler’s wells
An American in Paris
Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a…
Second thoughts
You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and…
Off the page
Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances…
Ménage à trois
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
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…
Gutted!
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…
Pulp fiction
Hot, languorous, sizzling… I was thinking what an ideal show Matthew Bourne’s noir comedy is to watch on a summer’s…
All you need is love
What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe…
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…
Walking with cadence
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
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…
Boris’s London legacy
Jack Wakefield on the Mayor’s ambitious, not to say whimsical, vision for the Olympic Park
50 shades of beige
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Down and out
The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious…
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…
Dance One last dance
I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Boys alone
GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of…
Tarts and Tchaikovsky
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
Boringly beautiful
Aesthetically speaking, last week’s performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater 1 was one by the slickest of the season. Fashionably…
No laughing matter
Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan…
Thinking games
Forget the pedantic classifications of genres, styles and schools. When it comes to dance performances, it all boils down to…
Irresistible zing and pizzazz
Philip Hensher on the tragically short life of the ebullient and multi-talented musician, Constant Lambert
Balanchinian ideal
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and…
