Judith Flanders writes regularly about theatre, dance and the contemporary arts and is a frequent contributor to the Telegraph, Guardian, Spectator and theartsdesk.com. She is now dance critic for the TLS. She has also broadcast on historical topics for BBC Radio 3 and was recently commissioned to record a series of short pieces about Charles Dickens’ London for BBC Radio 7
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)
By contrast, the Wellcome’s show of ex-voto panels from Mexico (main picture, above), the small thanks-offerings painted to record miraculous intercessions from the saints in the daily lives of ordinary people, has remained with me, images popping up in my mind at surprising moments: touching, funny, heart-breaking and above all fascinating.
On the dance front, two performances stand out, one for its choreography, one for a performer. The Mariinsky danced Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony on their summer visit. Lots of the critics didn’t engage with it, but to me it was a miracle of Romantic gossamer, seen through a sharp neo-classical prism. (Right, Alina Somova and Aleksandr Sergeyev, photo Natasha Razina/Mariinsky) That sounds overly intellectualised, but I felt like a child at her first ballet when watching, it was all so new and fresh. And Alina Cojocaru danced Manon as though it too were newly made. I’m told that there was a lot of backstage flak for her – it is true, not every step was performed exactly as choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan. But my god, the spirit was MacMillan’s, and the emotional power. It was one of the greatest tours de force I have ever seen. (full review)
T
he Nutcracker, if this isn’t too much of a mixed culinary metaphor, divides audiences like Marmite: love it or hate it. Usually it’s the critics who hate it, and for them it is often only the annual round of Nuts to be Cracked that wears on the soul. It is hard to imagine, otherwise, that anyone with functioning ears can fail to be thrilled as what is arguably Tchaikovsky’s greatest orchestral work begins to swell from the pit.
The Royal Ballet has, for the last quarter-century, been blessed with a model production. Where it has survived, Lev Ivanov’s choreography is carefully staged by Peter Wright; where it hasn’t, he has efficiently knitted the seams together with new material. More magical yet, Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets walk sure-footedly along the fine line between historical accuracy and theatrical magic. Wright revised his work about a decade ago, to balance better the realist/historical first act (little dancing, but lots for children to love) and the classical second (lots of dancing, but little narrative to keep the kinder amused). Both acts now work more harmoniously and the silence from the children in the audience even during the long danced segments proved the strength of his production.
There were some nice performances across the board: Fernando Montaño and Valentino Zuccheti, both young First Artists, impressed in the party scene; David Pickering was a splendidly ferocious Mouse King (and the Lower School tinies made particularly fine mice paramedics as they collected their fallen comrades). Ricardo Cervera was a splendid Nutcracker. Drosselmeyer, in many ways the key to any depths of emotion the evening may produce, was sensitively performed by William Tuckett, who was both a dab hand with the magic tricks, and also showed how Drosselmeyer’s magical persona is a shield for his loneliness. (full review)
'The
exhibition overlooks that Dickens’s greatness lay in knowing it is
our own minds, our own fears, that are the 'ghosts''
Well, if you haven’t yet realised that 2012 is Dickens Central, there’s no hope for you. The 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth is still two months away, but Claire Tomalin’s biography has scampered out of the starting gate already, as has Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s more scholarly Becoming Dickens. The Beeb is ready with a Great Expectations film this Christmas, and more adaptations to follow. The Museum of London has a Dickens and London exhibition opening on 9 December. (Full disclosure: I am involved with some/many of these things, and my own book – trumpet tootle – on Dickens and London will be out next year.)
So this small exhibition in the British Library’s foyer is really just a toe dipped in the water. Dickens is, today, most famous perhaps for Oliver Twist and for A Christmas Carol, with the latter having particularly high recognition from its many film and television adaptations. (I'm a fan of A Muppet Christmas Carol, although I discover that not only is there a Flintstone version, but also one featuring the Smurfs.) (Scrooge visited by Marley's ghost, pictured above.) Given this overload, the Library has, perhaps sensibly, taken only a small corner of what A Christmas Carol represents: Dickens and the supernatural.
Dickens was, very firmly and loudly, a non-believer in ghosts, spirits, table-rapping, séances and things that go bump in the night. He did, however, give credence to mesmerism (the older name for hypnotism), thinking it rooted in science. He even thought he had mesmeric power himself (and with a looser, metaphorical use of the word, his personal charisma very obviously made him mesmeric in person), practising on the wife of a friend in Italy, to his own wife’s great distress. (Pictured left, the letter Dickens wrote to her raking up the event years later, as their marriage disintegrated.) There is also a splendid Punch cartoon of John Elliotson, the doctor who promoted mesmerism, where he looks remarkably like a hairdresser suggesting a trim to his woman patient. (full review)