Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety at the Royal Ballet Three guys and a gal walk into a bar. It’s a set up for a gag, a murder, or perhaps an Edward Hopper painting. And now a ballet – Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety, newly premiered by the Royal Ballet in London. It is another absorbing, tantalising piece by a prolific yet puzzling British choreographer. The one-act ballet, centrepiece … [Read more...]
Mam’zelle Sexymoves
Seems I’m a lightweight. I thought that seeing two casts in the Royal Ballet's revival of Manon by Kenneth MacMillan was pretty dedicated, until one of my editors revealed she would watch six casts and had designs on a seventh. That's an awful lot of Manon: but MacMillan's 1974 ballet allows for a panoply of interpretation. Seeing how the pieces fall each time can become addictive. Manon, based … [Read more...]
Dead parrot ballet
Prokofiev’s score for Romeo and Juliet is pitiless in its tragedy, singing with a desperate hope. I mention this, because you’d never have guessed from the flatlining revival that opened the Mariinsky’s London season earlier this week. As Clement Crisp remarks, Romeo and Juliet was created during the siege of Leningrad, a response perhaps to cruel historical forces and to the fragility of … [Read more...]
Ballet on Ripper Street
On a pedestal or on a slab – are these the default settings for women in ballet? A friend decided not to join me at the Royal Ballet yesterday. Having seen the ads for its latest triple bill, he feared that Sweet Violets, about the Jack the Ripper murders, would glamourise violence against women. Every eminent Victorian bar Florence Nightingale has been suspected of being Jack the … [Read more...]
Silence by Shakespeare
The challenge with basing a ballet on Shakespeare isn’t, oddly, watching the words fall away. That’s a given. It’s how you mine the silences, the telling moments in which ambiguities cluster and on which the story turns. Christopher Wheeldon’s fascinating new ballet (for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada) of The Winter’s Tale – the first recorded of that brilliantly strange late … [Read more...]
What did you do in the war, mummy?
How do you stage warfare? In a year commemorating the centenary of the First World War, the conflict resists direct dramatisation. Naturalism struggles to capture the scale, and bathos might demean the dead. Dance embodied yet abstract vocabulary, a wordless form offers an opportunity to articulate the unspeakable. The choreographers in Lest We Forget, English National Ballet’s profoundly wrought … [Read more...]
Diversity? Just do it
At the Royal Opera House, ethnic diversity is usually more apparent among the ushers than the audience, but Ballet Black attracts a more varied crowd than the swanky home company can manage. This was evident in the ROH’s Linbury Theatre last night. And it was a rather good evening – two serious short pieces and, by Arthur Pita, the most deliriously enjoyable dance work of this short year. But … [Read more...]
Shouldn’t the swan be breathing?
There’s nothing like holding a gun to a swan to ruffle a balletgoer’s feathers. It’s hardly on the scale of Black Swan, but at Dance Gazette, the Royal Academy of Dance magazine, we caused a kerfuffle with ‘Keep, Rescue, Retire’ – a feature that invited leading international artistic directors to consider the state of the ballet repertoire. They all agreed it was too narrow – the victim of patchy … [Read more...]