Ismene Brown

Sacred Monsters, Sadler’s Wells: Sylvie Guillem and Akram Kham’s captivating final boogie

6 December 2014 9:00 am

I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…

‘This era’s supreme objet d’art’: Sylvie Guillem in 1985, aged 19, in her Paris Opera dressing-room

Sylvie Guillem interview: ‘A lot of people hate me. Bon. You can’t please everybody’

15 November 2014 9:00 am

On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives

Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

15 November 2014 9:00 am

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…

Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented

1 November 2014 9:00 am

You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…

All was beauteous with the Royal Ballet’s ‘Symphonic Variations’ on the first night

Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance

1 November 2014 9:00 am

English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…

Plisetskaya in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, 1964. She was one of the supreme trophies in the Soviet display case, the most garlanded, the most suspected

Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed'

25 October 2014 9:00 am

Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB

Turning feral: Lord of the Flies

Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies: when boys turn feral

18 October 2014 9:00 am

GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of…

Does a tart like Manon have a place in the Royal Ballet repertoire?

4 October 2014 9:00 am

What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…

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