Ballet
This Juliet needs a new Romeo
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
Giselle has floored many a ballerina — it did so again last week
English has all sorts of emotive metaphors for how we feel about the ground. We’re floored. Or well grounded. Or…
War, socialist tyranny and the oppression of the handicapped - welcome to the new dance season
If there’s one thing scarcer than hen’s teeth in serious choreography nowadays, it’s a light heart. When was the last…
Dance from Edinburgh: a flamenco master who could tell classical ballet a thing or two
Every August when London dims, Edinburgh calls, promising nothing less than ‘the greats of the arts’ at the International Festival.…
Sylvie Guillem’s better than ever in her final, final Coliseum farewell
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…
You can feel as if you’re in a colony of rabbits: Matthew Bourne’s Car Man reviewed
Hot, languorous, sizzling… I was thinking what an ideal show Matthew Bourne’s noir comedy is to watch on a summer’s…
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…
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…
Don’t believe Orson Welles, says his biographer Simon Callow — especially when he calls himself a failure
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…
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…
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…
Will the real Swan Lake please stand up
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
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…
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,…
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…
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
Does a tart like Manon have a place in the Royal Ballet repertoire?
What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon…
The wit, wisdom and womanising of Constant Lambert
Philip Hensher on the tragically short life of the ebullient and multi-talented musician, Constant Lambert
