February 2013
News: Nottdance 2013 - Are You Dancing?
Fancy a contemporary dance minibreak in March? Dance4 have teamed up with several central Nottingham hotels to offer weekend passes and discount accomodation... Continue Reading
News: ADAD's Lifetime Achievement Award announced
Peter Badejo, founder of Badejo Arts, has lived & worked in the UK since 1990 and is one of Nigeria’s foremost choreographers, dancers and African performance specialists. Continue Reading
Review: A Chorus Line
If I sound like I’ve just discovered the Holy Grail of musicals it’s maybe because a) 'A Chorus Line' didn’t mean that much to me in the past and b) this uplifting version knocked me out. Continue Reading
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch - Vollmond - Sadler's Wells
This is the kind of carnivalesque celebration that only Bausch could orchestrate, teetering between ecstasy and danger. Even if Vollmond doesn’t venture into the darkest chambers of her vintage work, it unlocks doors in the imagination, to which only she had the keys.
Interview: Charlie Bruce Q&A
Since winning the first series of So You Think You Can Dance in 2010, Charlie has performed in Dirty Dancing and Flash Mob -and she'll also be dancing at Move It next month... Continue Reading
Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
24 Preludes, Alexei Ratmansky’s magnificent new work for The Royal Ballet, glows at the heart of an awkward triple bill. The new Ratmansky makes the evening a hit, though it’s flanked by a shaky revival of Balanchine’s Apollo and Christopher Wheeldon’s half-bak…
Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
The cast dance through Ratmasky’s fluent and ingenious encounters, evoking sudden joys and mysterious despairs, and continue until there dawns the heretical thought that Chopin/Françaix is a damned bore, and that one more embrace, yet another fall to the ground with…
Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
Ratmansky leaves all the flesh, though, and the eight dancers move through ballet’s dramatic tropes — longing, romance, tears, questing, heroism, running offstage with sleeves billowing — getting to the nub of the emotion without worrying about pesky plot, in def…
Review: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch - Vollmond - Sadler's Wells
It's hardly a coincidence that the main image from 'Pina' - Wim Wenders' sensational posthumous film for Pina Bausch - is taken from 'Vollmond'. There is so much beauty contained i… Continue Reading
Review: 2Faced Dance Company - Out Of His Skin - The Place
Dancers cut & slide across the stage, swinging from & leaping off a piece of set built to look like the skeleton of a tower block. They jump onto & dive over each other with dazzling energy and speed... Continue Reading
Review: Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
Balanchine's Apollo may still be unequalled but Kevin O'Hare's first season as Director continues to build steam. New commissions from Ratmansky & Wheeldon are strong investments for the future... Continue Reading
Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
The first of these is also one of the ballet’s wonders: against a twilit, watery sky, dancers spin delicate traceries of movement that shimmer, coalesce and fade like the clouds themselves. It’s movement and music fused in Ratmansky’s own version of t…
Richard Alston Dance Company - Mixed Bill - New Wimbledon Theatre
There are dragonfly hoverings and humming stillnesses, consequential and unfathomable physical exchanges. If Bausch’s work offers a claustrophobic compression, Alston’s appears expandable to infinity.
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch - Two Cigarettes in the Dark
Two Cigarettes is diverting enough, but looks slight when compared to earlier, more excoriating Bausch works such as Café Müller (1978). Archness has replaced insight, and as tableau succeeds Dadaist tableau,
Royal Ballet - Apollo / 24 Preludes / Aeternum - Royal Opera House
Steven McRae has seldom soared or spun more athletically than in the “Presto”, Alina Cojocaru’s lightness and speed make her a fantastic “Dragonfly”, and Zenaida Yanowsky and Ed Watson’s long-limbed capacity for drama is expertly exploited, too.