Christopher Wheeldon
Christopher Wheeldon’s real gifts lie in abstract dance
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m…
There are passages of considerable eloquence in Royal Ballet’s The Winter’s Tale
There’s no escaping Christopher Wheeldon – a modest, amiable fellow from Yeovil of whom anyone’s mum would be proud. Reaching…
Lost in space
My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s…
Sweet nothing
How much weight of plot can dance carry? Balanchine famously insisted that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, and masters…
Just the ticket
Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked…
Lockdown unlocked
The choreographers called on to get the nation’s dancers back on to the stage have as much to say about…
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…
The men give the women little to work with: Giselle reviewed
A bumper fortnight for Covent Garden florists thanks to a 20th-anniversary flower shower for the Royal Ballet’s Marianela Nunez and…
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…
Pretty vacant
Alice is at it again. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 three-act ballet began another sell-out run at Covent Garden last week. It’s…
The female gaze
Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced…
Sex on legs
That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run…
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…
Boys on the march
In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo…
S’wonderful
A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places,…
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Study in spectacle
In a dance world that has chosen to dispense with stylistic and semantic subtleties, ‘narrative ballet’ and ‘story ballet’ are…
