contemporary dance
The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised
Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running…
Budget Ballets Russes: BRB2’s Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet reviewed
Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is…
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…
Uninventive and far too polite: BRB’s Black Sabbath – The Ballet reviewed
Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain…
Dancing feat
Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden,…
Lost in space
My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s…
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…
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…
There will be blood
Like musical supergroups and Olympic basketball teams, ballet galas tend to prize individual gifts over group cohesion. A recent one…
Cheerleaders, cultists and King Kong
Social distancing continues to put the kibosh on large-scale productions, but Jo Stromgren has a nifty workaround in Rooms, which…
Bar-room ballet
Thank God for the fast-forward button. Sadler’s Wells had planned a tentative return to live performance last month but the…
Rhapsody in blue
When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans…
Eroticism and ecstasy
Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed…
The Boyz are back in town
Another day in isolation, another bid to find joy in my lone state-sanctioned walk. (Pro tip: stay out longer than…
Manon can be magnificent, this one was merely meh
Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country…
Still far from perfect but chaps will like it: Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein reviewed
Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with…
Almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise: Northern Ballet’s Victoria reviewed
Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could…
William Forsythe on the day the US government threatened to arrest him
William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as…
