I’ve spent a week thinking about swans. Ballet swans, mostly, with feathery bodies, aching hearts. Last Thursday, Liam Scarlett’s richly imagined Swan Lake opened at the Royal Ballet, replacing a 31-year-old version and offering an opportunity to rethink the way the story is told. I took part in some of the events the Royal Opera House held in its wake – interviewing artists, facilitating … [Read more...]
Scarlett fever
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...]
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...]
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...]