Ninja Turtles have no place in Cinderella
What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe…
The Sun King deserves better than this silly cabaret from Birmingham Royal Ballet
It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the…
The choreographer that does things to tango couples that Relate would not recommend
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
Is that Sylvie Guillem? Or R2-D2? Guillem's farewell dance at Sadler’s Wells reviewed
There’s been a clutch of middle-aged danseuses taking leave of life in one way or another recently. We’ve seen the…
Rapture - and loathing: Woolf Works at the Royal Ballet reviewed
People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe…
Rosie Kay’s 5 Soldiers: brutishly physical and powerfully striking
In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo…
La Fille mal gardee at the Royal Opera House reviewed: light, lithe and tender
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
An Indian Bayadère that meets a sludgy end
For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877…
Birmingham Royal Ballet review: A Father Ted Carmina Burana
We ballet-goers may be the most self-deceiving audiences in theatre. Put a ‘new work’ in front of us and half…
Leonid Yakobson: the greatest ballet genius you’ve never heard of
On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in…
50 shades of beige: English National Ballet's Modern Masters at Sadler's Wells, reviewed
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
A legendary piece of iconoclastic dance returns. Does the piece still stand up?
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Will the real Swan Lake please stand up
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
The Associates at Sadler's Wells reviewed: another acutely inventive work from Crystal Pite
The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious…
London International Mime Festival review: on juggling, dance and Wayne Rooney's hair transplant
January is something of a palate-cleanser for the year, as the London International Mime Festival flies in plane-loads of companies…
ENB’s Swan Lake: the rights and wrongs of ballet thighs
There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan…
An American in Paris: a zingy new Wheeldon dance-musical that you won’t want to miss
A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places,…
Royal Ballet’s Don Quixote: Carlos Acosta is too brainy with this no-brain ballet
One feels the pang of impending failure whenever the Royal Ballet ventures like a deluded Don Quixote into a periodic…
Sacred Monsters, Sadler’s Wells: Sylvie Guillem and Akram Kham’s captivating final boogie
I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…
Sylvie Guillem interview: ‘A lot of people hate me. Bon. You can’t please everybody’
On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives
Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed’
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies: when boys turn feral
GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of…
