Success in running a large and expanding dance-house enterprise requires knowing when to play safe and when to play with fire, trusting that your audience will come with you.
If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it. The Winter’s Tale, originally a “romance” in five acts, is widely regarded as a problem play, not only because of its lack of poetic blank verse or cheerful rhymed couplets, but because of its lurching narrative tone, the first three acts filled with bleak psychological drama, the last two comic and frothy.
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this pleasingly eldritch narrative debut by documentary-maker Paul Duane, it’s unclear whether the forbidden tune will turn out to be a love ballad, a curse, or both.
Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a valuable legacy for his widow and daughter – companies around the world have an endless appetite for staging them.
The story of Carmen is catnip to choreographers. No matter how many times this 180-year-old narrative has been tweaked and reframed in art, theatre, opera, dance and film, they keep coming back for more – which is curious when you consider that Carmen began life in a saucy French novella read in smoking rooms and gentlemen’s clubs.
In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow through the world once the world knows it needs it, there’s a rainbow-coloured river of just about everything musical and choreographic that’s found its place in contemporary Ireland, performed with a pulsating energy as well as a poetry that stops you wondering too much about all the connections.
In uncertain times like these, the single thing that every flagship ballet company needs is a convincing iteration of a 19th-century blockbuster. New works are all very well and necessary, but they don’t have the pulling power of Swan Lake, or the staying power. The Royal Ballet’s previous production served the company well for three decades, more than justifying the original investment.
There are moments that forever remain imprinted in our consciousness, engraved on the general map of our lives. I cannot forget the excitement of seeing snow for the first time in Córdoba, aged three or four, rushing to walk on it only to slip straight away and fall on my behind! Or when I discovered the sea, in Cádiz.
It’s tempting to see the second gala created by Ukrainian-born Ivan Putrov as a reflection of the shift in Ukraine’s fortunes since his first one in March 2022. Somehow, just weeks after Ukraine was invaded, Putrov and his fellow student in Kyiv, Alina Cojocaru, brought the world’s finest principals to the London Coliseum for a show-stopping gala that was as moving as it was finely executed.
Perhaps the most memorable of the stage designs Peter Pabst created for Pina Bausch is back in London after nearly 20 years: a sea of erect pink silk carnations, the Nelken of the title. It’s canonical that there are 8,000 of them, but only the backstage team know the truth of that.