Culture

When the American choreographer Paul Taylor died at the age of 88 in 2018, he should have been consecrated a patron saint of modern dance. He had respectfully lifted the pall of earnestness and mythic archetypes that his mentor Martha Graham had stiflingly cast over it, and let the sunshine in. Graham may have been

Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the state, hampered by barnacled traditions (including compulsory retirement on a full pension at the age of 42) and about twice the size of our own dear Royal Ballet. They do things differently there. Programming favours

Most choreographers today have lost interest in using music as anything more than a background wash of colour and mood. More’s the pity. For an earlier generation the idea that the dance grew through the music – into and out of it – was of the essence: or, as Balanchine famously said: ‘See the music,

The Royal Ballet has scheduled what – on paper at least – looks like one of the most dismally dull and cautious seasons I can recall. The company is hobbled by a £21.7 million government loan (that had tided the place over during Covid), which the Royal Opera House is being forced to ‘service’. One

The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates, but in La Fille mal gardée, it’s sunlit springtime and young love is busting out all over. Frederick Ashton’s bucolic masterpiece, revived by the Royal Ballet, manages to be both child-like in its innocence and

Let’s face it, The Sleeping Beauty runs the high risk of being a bit of a bore. A wonderfully inventive score by Tchaikovsky fires it up of course, but precious little drama emerges after nasty Carabosse gatecrashes the royal christening, and there’s too much imperial parading and courtly kowtowing throughout. Connoisseurs may relish what survives

R:Evolution is a pun, presumably intended to suggest that tradition is not static and the obvious truth that change always grows out of what has come before. A useful idea, of course, even if it’s one that the four short works selected under this title by English National Ballet doesn’t smoothly illustrate. The management is,

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s show doesn’t even pretend to live up to the arresting proposition in its title – anyone hoping to glean a few useful tips on becoming a dancer would come away bitterly disappointed. What the Irish choreographer offers instead is a witty and touching exercise in autobiography in which he is ably abetted and

A common flaw in narrative ballet today is the attempt to tell stories that are too complex and ramified for the vocabulary of dance to convey. With Jonathan Watkins’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s slim novella A Single Man, the flaw is the opposite. George, a middle-aged prof, is traumatised and in mourning for his recently

Giselle is my favourite among the 19th-century classics. Blessed with a charming score by the melodically fertile Adolphe Adam and a serviceable but resonant plot, the drama – loosely based on a story by Heine – holds water without being swollen by superfluous divertissements. Its principal characters – the village maiden Giselle and her nobleman-in-disguise

What to make of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which this week made its British debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall? The bare facts indicate that it’s a ‘crazy shit’ performance group of some repute, the brainchild of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, established 19 years ago, based in New York, its weird name taken

It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several

Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them

Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and

Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent.

The first time I saw the work of Trajal Harrell I stomped out in a huff muttering about the waste of public money and is this what the art of dance has come to. But perversely I was drawn back for more of its weirdness, and after The Köln Concert I am relenting. The guy

Any evening devoted to the multifaceted genius of George Balanchine is something to be grateful for, manna in the wilderness indeed, but the Royal Ballet’s current offering left me hungry for more. Three works were on the programme, all created in the early stage of the great man’s career, two of them widely familiar, none

How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the abstract tendency in post-war American culture, the lover and collaborator of John Cage, Cunningham emptied barefoot dance of ideology, symbolism, plot, personality, pretension: instead it became purely an exploration of bodies in movement, responsive to

One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours.

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers

Arts Council England may be successfully clobbering the poor old genre of opera into the ground, but its sister art dance continues to be nurtured ever more generously, and the London scene is as ebulliently youthful and healthily various as it’s ever been. At the top end there’s the Royal Ballet, currently a match for

Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues,

Since its première in Paris in 1841, Giselle has weathered a bumpy ride. For St Petersburg in 1884, Petipa gave Coralli and Perrot’s original choreography the once-over and Fokine grafted on further innovations when Diaghilev brought the ballet to London in 1911. Despite casts led by Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky, it bombed here with critics

Ruination begins with an ironic prologue in which a choric figure warns the audience that what follows makes unlikely matter for the festive season: look elsewhere if you’re after light entertainment, he says, because this is going to shake you up a bit. And it does. This is genre-defying physical theatre, ‘devised’ by Ben Duke,

After taking a wrong turn culminating in the misbegotten Frankenstein, Akram Khan has wisely returned to his original inspiration in kathak, the ancient dance culture of northern India synthesising both Hindu and Muslim mysticism and mythology. The result is something deeply impressive and beautiful that held me enraptured for an hour. This is the work

Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The profound truth of such a proposal is forcefully borne out by the wretched muddle of Wayne McGregor’s MaddAddam, an over-inflated farrago drawn from a triptych of visionary fictions by Margaret Atwood. McGregor – hugely talented

I think I’m through with Hofesh Shechter, and that’s a pity, because earlier work of his such as Political Mother thrilled me with its unedited passion and energy. But after several duds and misfires, I feel that with Theatre of Dreams he’s run out of ideas and hit a dead end. The title suggests what’s

Ballet companies have become dismally timid about exploring their 20th-century heritage: everything nowadays must be either box-fresh new or a fairy-tale classic, which seems to me a recipe for an unbalanced diet. So I’m pleased that under the directorship of Federico Bonelli, Northern Ballet is pluckily dusting off neglected treasures of the recent past. Last