Dance
Ashes, Les Ballets C de la B
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The creation of postmodern dance works set to new and somewhat provocative arrangements of Baroque music seems to have become a signature feature of Les Ballets C de la B. In Ashes, dance-maker Koen Augustijnen draws upon a set of Handel’s Italian arias and duets to explore issues of mortality, loss, abandonment and lack of achievement. Both the formula and its ingredients are not that different from those of Pitié!, Alain Platel’s powerful reading of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which I reviewed so enthusiastically a few months back. Apart from the many similarities, Ashes does not come across as theatrically...
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Ballets Russes
English National Ballet, Sadler’s Wells
I think Diaghilev would have been thrilled to attend the opening night of English National Ballet’s centenary celebrations of his Ballets Russes. Not unlike his famously orchestrated 1909 dress rehearsal at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris, ENB’s performance was attended by a glamorous array of stars, celebrities and former glories, complete with paparazzi at the entrance.
Luckily, the buzz was not just on one side of the curtain, as the first of the two Ballets Russes celebration programmes was also glamorous and generally well performed. Thanks to an intelligent approach, none of the ‘old’ items reeked of mothballs; not even...
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Jewels
Royal Opera House
Created in 1967 for a stellar cast of dance artists, Jewels is one of the most written about of Balanchine’s ballets. Intrigued by its uncommon structure, namely three choreographically diverse, plotless sections set to different music, dance writers have long debated the work’s possible meanings. Today it is generally agreed that the ‘first abstract three-act ballet’, as it was originally referred to in the press, draws upon the gems’ pretext to show a reading of three different ballet epochs: the Romantic one (Emeralds), the jazzy, all-American modern one (Rubies) and the one that Balanchine loved most for biographical reasons, the...
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I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening of 18 May 1909 for the dress rehearsal of the new Saison Russe, organised by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, or ‘de’ Diaghilev as he liked to be called.
I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening of 18 May 1909 for the dress rehearsal of the new Saison Russe, organised by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, or ‘de’ Diaghilev as he liked to be called. That evening, the notable audience invited to the exclusive event were to see ballet as they had never seen it before. Gone were the pretty ladies in frilly skirts, conventional backdrops and purely ornamental choreography. What Mr ‘de’ Diaghilev gave his respectable — and not so respectable — audience (he had intentionally invited some notorious ladies as a publicity...
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H3: Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to establish itself outside the boundaries of an urban phenomenon by entering, though not always successfully, the theatre arts arena. Within the past ten years there have been many examples of ‘theatricalised’ street dance, and a number of good performances too. Yet the social, cultural and political imprint associated with that dance form has frequently prevented...
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Giselle; Triple Bill
The Royal Ballet
In my view, the debuts of Marianela Nuñez and Lauren Cuthbertson in Giselle have been the highlights of London’s current ballet season. I wish I had the writing abilities of Théophile Gautier, the man who first turned dance criticism into a respectable profession, to be able to convey the excitement I found at each performance. Alas, only a great romantic writer like Gautier could come up with one-word definitions that encapsulate the distinctive qualities of great artists — in his words, Marie Taglioni’s ethereal dancing was ‘Christian’, while Fanny Elssler’s more sensuous and earth-bound style was ‘pagan’. Besides, times change...
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