Dance

As graduation ceremonies go, the Royal Ballet School’s annual matinée ranks among the most spectacular. It takes place at the Royal Opera House in front of an adoring parental audience, and although it serves primarily as a showcase for those passing out into the profession, it also contains spots for all 250 or so pupils, ranging in age from 11 to 19 and globally recruited, culminating in a glorious parade (called the défilé) of the entire establishment, drilled with a precision that reminds one of ballet’s miliary roots. This year Christopher Powney, the school’s artistic director for the past decade, hands over to Iain Mackay, formerly a principal at Birmingham

To defend my case that Frederick Ashton ought to be acknowledged as one of the major artistic geniuses of the last century, I would adduce three crucial pieces of evidence, garnered from the Royal Ballet’s ‘Ashton Celebrated’ festival at Covent Garden this month. Oberon and Titania’s love is an open contest between two unyielding wills: it can’t be danced gently The first is ‘Les Rendezvous’, dating from 1933 and one of his earliest enduring creations. Set in a Victorian park in which some harmless young people meet to flirt and circulate, it provides an object lesson in how to make something supremely but unaffectedly stylish out of a wafer-thin premise.

Over this summer you can see Swan Lake performed at the Royal Opera House by the Royal Ballet; at the Coliseum by a company from Georgia; at Sadler’s Wells by Chinese acrobats; and at the Royal Albert Hall by English National Ballet. It is expected therefore to attract audiences of Taylor Swiftian magnitude – well in excess of 100,000, by my very rough reckoning. And should you dread autumnal withdrawal symptoms, then fear not: a film of Matthew Bourne’s version will be shown in cinemas in September, prior to a national live tour starting in November and continuing until May, including a two-month season at Sadler’s Wells over Christmas. There

I encountered Frederick Ashton at a dinner party shortly before he died in 1988. Frail and anxious, he clutched my arm and demanded to know which of his creations I thought would survive him. I duly reeled off some titles, but felt that any opinion I expressed would have disappointed him. In public, he professed to care not a fig for posterity, but he evidently did, and his will set out thoughtful arrangements parcelling ownership of his works out to various trusted colleagues, with the bulk passing to his nephew, the Royal Ballet’s administrative director Anthony Russell-Roberts. How exhilarating to be reminded of Ashton’s remarkable range, and of choreography so

Samuel Beckett was notoriously reluctant to let people muck about with his work, so it’s somewhat surprising to learn that he licensed and approved Maguy Marin’s May B. This 90-minute ‘dance theatre’ fantasia may play on vaguely Beckettian themes but in no way is it faithful to his texts or instructions – in some respects it even subverts them. Yet it has enjoyed huge success all over Europe since its première in 1982, and finally reached Britain last week. A long wait, for something that turns out to be very odd indeed. Ten dancers of all shapes and sizes in grotesque make-up and dressed in chalky, tatty underclothes stand immobile

There’s no escaping Christopher Wheeldon – a modest, amiable fellow from Yeovil of whom anyone’s mum would be proud. Reaching outside the ballet bubble, his stagings of An American in Paris and the Michael Jackson musical have wowed the West End, Broadway and beyond. My guess is that his take on Oscar Wilde, to be premiered in Australia later this year, will soon travel north, too. Next season the Royal Ballet will revive his box-office smash Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as a programme drawn from his plentiful short pieces. Two summers ago, he presented us with an adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate (not so tasty).

In 2010, when his thrillingly edgy and angry Political Mother delivered modern dance a winding punch right where it hurt, I had high hopes for Hofesh Shechter. Here was an outsider with the courage to make his own rules and engage dance with real-world issues (he had served a traumatising period in the Israeli army) rather than blindly following the fashionable goddess Pina Bausch down the rabbit hole of postmodern irony. He wasn’t interested in playing games. But success has taken his edge off and what has followed has largely been disappointing. Trapped by a limited choreographic vocabulary, Shechter has repeated himself, relying too hard on the brute effect of

Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the evasively seductive gypsy and the human monster machine being lazily recycled and plundered and vulgarised in various forms to the point at which their authentic primal power has been altogether deflated. So it was with a heavy sigh that I anticipated their two latest danced iterations. No surprises were likely, and none were delivered. It’s not bad, it’s just not good enough – yet another retread of familiar material The list of choreographers – Roland Petit, Alberto Alonso, John Cranko, Mats Ek, Antonio Gades, Matthew Bourne, Carlos Acosta – who

My feelings about the genius of Kenneth MacMillan have always been volatile, but in the course of the Royal Ballet’s current triple bill, they veered even more wildly than usual between uncomplicated delight, awed reverence and embarrassment. A revival of his early Danses Concertantes, firing off Stravinsky at his most effervescent and designed with exuberantly colourful Festival-of-Britain jazziness by Nicholas Georgiadis, provided half an hour of pure joy. Stylistically an exercise in the neoclassicism that dominated the postwar era, it’s witty, chic and upbeat, exploring sharp angles rather than smooth curves and lyrical lines. MacMillan’s choreographic invention is profligate, with little twists and unexpected turns, all infused with an infectious

Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain flogging the Big Issue than suffer the racket that goes by the name of Black Sabbath. The noise, my dear, and the people! How could they? So I approached Birmingham Royal Ballet’s attempt to dance to its shenanigans armed with earplugs and gritted teeth. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected: in fact, it erred towards the polite and tasteful, and I wondered if a crowd largely consisting of hairy and leathery old rockers – some of them possibly anticipating satanic rituals or heads being bitten off chickens –

Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden, where he ran a similarly scaled company comfortably subsidised by public funds. Doubtless, he finds what the Arts Council gives ENB meagre to the point of stingy. One may wonder, therefore, what the attraction is, but he certainly inherits from Tamara Rojo a solid organisation and a fine body of dancers, particularly strong on the male side. His inaugural piece of programming is striking but not altogether successful. It starts gloriously with Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, an essay in his grand tsarist style, set to some noble music by Tchaikovsky,

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film about a ballet and its company, is 75 this month, and its birthday is being marked with great fanfare. From October to December, the BFI is putting on a major retrospective of the films of Powell and Pressburger, with an accompanying exhibition and nationwide screenings of The Red Shoes itself. A companion book to The Red Shoes by Pamela Hutchinson – stuffed with insight and background – is being published, as well as a lavish volume, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, complete with pictures and essays (almost love letters) about the late filmmakers from artists such as Tilda Swinton

In 2015 Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from the Royal Ballet and the classical repertory. It seemed like the right moment; he was 42 and, truth to tell, some of us could detect a slight waning of his prowess and physique. Time to move on: since then, he has done great work in his native Cuba and is currently a venturesome artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. He is a rather wonderful person. Eight years after his withdrawal from Covent Garden, however, he has made a brief return – addressing an itch, he says, that had to be scratched. The house sold out for five nights running and the reception

Through several phases of the culture wars, ballet has served as a canary in the coal mine, its intense and exposed physicality highlighting all the issues surrounding sexuality, gender and power that have currently become our unhealthily narcissistic preoccupation. Perhaps the warnings started with the phenomenon of Vaslav Nijinsky. Against the defined masculinity and femininity of the Edwardian era, he stood out as seductively androgynous and effeminate as well as staggeringly charismatic – a godlike hero unashamed to represent le spectre de la rose. Bloomsbury ogled, and rumours about his pederastic relationship with his patron Serge Diaghilev circulated scandalously. Fonteyn said that if people knew what she endured only those

My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s certainly a mint-cool, squeaky-clean, future-perfect affair. The set by Carmen Herrera, subtly lit by Lucy Carter, suggests infinite space and distant horizons. The costumes by Burberry are streamlined and sexless. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s vaporous score hovers over it all in a meditative trance. Ordinary human emotions struggle to express themselves in this brave new world: we have left planet Earth. McGregor’s strengths and weaknesses are highlighted: on the credit side, there’s his energy and intelligence, his sophisticated visual taste, his empowering of young talent, his open questioning of boundaries, and readiness

This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly comfortable. In its hinterland is the Judson Church in New York: it was here, during the early 1960s, that young Turks such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton began investigating the idea that dance need not involve formalised gestures or what primary school teachers call ‘movement to music’, but could grow instead out of quotidian activities such as running, jumping and walking. From that point of departure, the journey has become ever more extreme and contorted, traversing the realms of performance art and installation, often politicised and sometimes pornographic. I

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally. Five years on, Pite

Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a superficial acquaintance with Peaky Blinders. So my response to The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, a new ballet drawing on the popular television series about gangland Birmingham during the 1920s, is that of a rank outsider. Produced by Rambert (in association with Birmingham Hippodrome), it represents the company’s admirable attempt to find a broader audience and move out of the modern dance ghetto – hence presenting the show at the new Troubadour Theatre in Wembley Park rather than Sadler’s Wells. A spot check on the demographic suggests that it succeeded: but

Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture. In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of inclusivity and diversity and step gingerly over the eggshells of elitism, racism, gender politics and decolonisation. Its hands are further tied by the requirement to operate as extensions of the social services. The diktats of Levelling Up have to be honoured. The disabled and the disadvantaged, the young and the old are all crying out