The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape begins before the house lights dim,
I know, I know, I go on about reviews and reviewing, but apart from personal feelings, they matter. I was recently criticized in a chat-forum (link omitted for reasons of taste) for being ‘mean’ to some of the New York City Ballet dancers who appeared in London on a tour
The Olivier awards, theoretically the West End’s pinnacle of theatre awards, nominated for the ‘Outstanding Achievement in Dance’, um, no dancers. Sorry, run that one past me again? Not one. Apparently no dancers were considered ‘outstanding’. Sorry, dazzling dancers of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. Sorry, Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.
Today’s mystery. I was writing a piece for the Sunday Times earlier in the year, and they sent me some images to accompany my review. One was captioned ‘Taglioni’: I’m pretty clear it’s not Taglioni — the shoes, everything about it suggests 1870s/1880s to me, and, although I don’t know
A fabulous show at the National Portrait Gallery. The bits that clearly the curators think the public will like – the celebrity portraits – are ‘meh’. I mean, they’re fine, and even fun. There’s an insanely childish-looking Margot Fonteyn, which is hard (impossible) to resist, and a picture of Ezra
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