Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility.
The fabulous dancers known as BalletBoyz The Talent 2014 looked so at home in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre last night that it was hard to believe they had never performed there before. The BalletBoyz themselves, Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt, were Royal Ballet leading men back in the day, and they have been back to Covent Garden since leaving in 1999 to explore new avenues in contemporary ballet for men, but this was the first time that their new company of young dancers (now 10-strong) had been invited into the inner sanctum of British ballet.
MurleyDance is something of an oddity in the world of small independent dance companies, in that it proudly wears pointe shoes. Yes, this is – according to its own publicity - the only professional classical ballet company attending the Fringe, and Artistic Director David Murley is playing that uniqueness for all he’s worth, issuing a press release calling for more ballet companies to attend Edinburgh’s annual arts circus.
Mounting a contemporary dance show together doesn’t seem like the best way to get over your ex, even if you are (or rather, were) ballet’s most fabulously marketable couple.
School’s out for summer, even Parliament is on recess, and the streets around my house are suddenly devoid of children, as families make for the hills (or at least the beach). It should be dead season for all but prommers (and the suffering residents of Edinburgh) but ballet in London has had the most extraordinary week of first-class acts, with the Mariinsky at the Royal Opera House, Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant at the Coliseum, and now the BalletBoyz’ 10-strong troupe The Talent at the Roundhouse in Camden.
If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank, and only in your mid-forties when injuries came calling and roles started to fall away - unwelcome signs that the end of a classical ballet career is nigh.
Having a strong company style is usually no bad thing, especially if – as with San Francisco Ballet – the main component of it is a commitment to excellence. It has been impressive watching the gritty energy with which, night after night, the American visitors to Paris dish up meaty triple bills (most pieces coming in at 35 minutes or longer) and serve them with éclat. Polish and professionalism like this help dancers keep going through a gruelling tour, and ensure audiences go away happy. But you can have too much of a good thing.
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for the Parisian performing arts, the festival prospered, and in this its 10th year, has brought the Americans back with a stonking programme. Every night of the 17-date run at the Théâtre du Châtelet features a different triple bill, covering in total 18 pieces by twelve choreographers – and that’s not counting the opening gala.
No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. And yet that's exactly where they've placed their dancers in the opening piece, Sehnsucht, of this impressive Sadler's Wells program.
There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine, perform this operation with anything like the skill and intelligence of Dada Masilo, whose 2010 version of Swan Lake opened the lively short smorgasbord season that Sadler’s Wells are calling their Sampled festival.