Ballet biography wins top theatre book prize
Jann Parry's study of choreographer Kenneth MacMillan is book of the year
The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.
Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me, BBC Four
Arena and Clint Eastwood's superb evocation of the multi-talented songwriter
Different Drummer: the Life of Kenneth MacMillan
Interview with Jann Parry, calm biographer of ballet's shock creator
The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard.
theartsdesk Q&A: Tim Lawrence
Interview with the biographer of cult genre-traversing musician Arthur Russell
Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell.