Rupert Christiansen

‘Ballet is woman,’ Balanchine once gnomically pronounced. A remark not to be taken too literally, but essentially true. Like every afflicted balletomane, I can map out my lifelong passion for the art in terms of my adoration from afar of a succession of ballerinas – any awe I feel for their male counterparts is something

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

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 history of the male ballet dancer is a chequered one. In the early 19th century, he was the star of the show, albeit more as an acrobat and tumbler than fairy-tale prince. The vogue for sylph-like damsels floating in white tulle put paid to that, reducing him to the auxiliary role of porter and

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

Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new storehouse in Stratford’s Olympic Park are being enthralled by an atmospherically lit chamber devoted to the display of one vast and magnificent work of art: Picasso’s 10 metre-high, 11 metre-wide drop-curtain for Le Train Bleu, a popular hit of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, first seen in 1924. The

Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old

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

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch