Royal albert hall

Was Tamara Rojo, when she danced Swan Lake last Saturday at the Albert Hall, thinking as she shaped each phrase, ‘This will be the last time I dance this …and this …and this’? I wonder. She told me a few years back that she had a five-year diary to cover the rest of her dancing career, a diary ending in 2016. Akram Khan’s modern Giselle this autumn will be a Rojo role, but if at 42 she was privately saying farewell to her classical career on Saturday, she did it with the spectacular and refined artistry the public has come to expect. A woman sitting next to me complained that

There have been many punk exhibitions over the years so I can’t help but chuckle at the ‘experts’ who are getting hot under the collar about the ‘sacrilege’ of housing punk memorabilia in museums. Hasn’t it always been the case that anything considered culturally significant ends up in a ‘cultural establishment’ of sorts? Joe Corré, son of Dame Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, is even threatening to burn his punk collection in protest. Really!! The experts I know, i.e. band members, don’t seem too bothered about it. In fact, many will be turning up to do Q&As at the British Library’s tasteful if limited Punk 1976–78 exhibition. As the title

I was watching the Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza at the Royal Albert Hall last week, thinking how much base, uncomplicated enjoyment can be had away from dance. Such relief to watch contortionists, trapezists, high-wire cyclists and crazed men skipping on the Wheel of Death, such relief just to be amazed. If they didn’t make my palms pour sweat with fear, my jaw drop with disbelief, I’d feel dreadfully let down. I wonder what happened to being amazed in dance. I was talking with a friend last week about the lack of amazement offered by the bulk of ballerinas in current productions of the 19th-century warhorses Don Quixote (Royal Ballet) and Swan