Van Gogh at Work: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Marije Vellekoop, with Nienke Bakker; translated by Ted Alkins, Michael Hoyle and Beverley Jackson (304pp. Brussels: Mercatorfonds. £40) On May Day, thousands of Amsterdammers queued in the spring sunshine as the Van Gogh Museum formally reopened its doors after a seven-month refit,
Death Drive: PW Talks with Judith Flanders In The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death & Detection and Created Modern Crime historian Judith Flanders examines how 19th-century Brits dealt with – and capitalized upon – rising crime levels. What prompted you to write this book? I was
My great-grandmother used to say, “In the fall, leaves fall,” meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a
Poor Nijinsky. Poor sad, mad, vanished Nijinsky. His career was astonishingly brief, the trail that was left in his meteoric wake so persistent it is hard to believe he danced for little more than seven years. He was born in 1889 or 1890, to Polish dancers working in Russia (Nijinsky
Marketing leaves nothing untouched in the twenty-first century. Tamara Rojo, the newly appointed director of English National Ballet, knows this well and proficiently plays the game. Thus for her first piece of programming, she has linked three works by an overarching title, appearing to give coherence to an evening that
It’s not often you go to a ballet to watch a history lesson unfold, but Laurencia, the 1939 Soviet ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, gives us exactly that, and a gripping one under the froth and fun. Based on the 17th-century playwright Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, Laurencia tells of
If you want virtuosity, there’s only one place to be in London right now, and that’s watching the Mikhailovsky’s fine production of that demented old warhorse, Don Quixote, with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in the leads. Don Quixote is one of the 19th-century’s pastiche pleasures, half-pantomime, half-burlesque, all razzmatazz.
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky,
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