Joshua junker

Even if Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire is never going to feature on anyone’s Desert Island Discs, it stands as a work of rich and complex resonance shot through with all the neurotically introverted obsessions behind expressionism. Through Albert Giraud’s 21 opaque lyrics, scored atonally for a soprano who declaims rather than sings them, accompanied by seven instruments, it presents some sort of parable of the tormented artist adrift in a hostile world. Perhaps one can’t be charmed by the result, yet its power is undeniable: it grips even when it baffles and repels. Perhaps one can’t be charmed, yet its power is undeniable: it grips even when it baffles

For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be retreating towards the butch – ironically, just as the rest of the world is moving obsessively to the femme. Scroll back a century or so and Nijinsky cross-dressed at masked balls, danced on pointe and covered himself in petals as le spectre de la rose; in Les Biches, his sister Nijinska shamelessly choreographed all manner of sexual indeterminacy and suggested that girls could also be boys. Then came the Carry On stereotype of limp-wristed ephebes in pink tights with an ominous bulge – every mother’s nightmare in the homophobic post-war