Wayne McGregor
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,…
A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed
Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The…
Lost in space
My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s…
Just the ticket
Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked…
Eroticism and ecstasy
Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed…
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…
One nasty moment aside, the ENB’s Manon is superlative
If you like the BBC’s Les Misérables, you’ll love English National Ballet’s Manon. Manon, in Kenneth MacMillan’s telling, is The…
Has the Royal Ballet found its hero?
The Royal Ballet is a company in search of a prince. It has no lack of dancing princesses. You could…
Wayne’s world
Ballet would have been an obvious revenue stream for Sadler’s Wells when it reopened back in 1998 but straight-up classics…
Not vintage Mariinsky
Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the…
Emotional intelligence
The difference between a poor ballet of the book (see the Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein) and a good one — indeed…
The female gaze
Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced…
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…
Notes on a scandal
How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer…
Off the page
Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances…
Woolf haul
People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe…
Inspired by Bach
It appears that J.S. Bach’s music is to theatre-dance what whipped cream is to chocolate. Masterworks such as Trisha Brown’s…
Seasonal treats
There was a time when the term ‘world première’ was not as fashionable as it is these days. Great works…
