There are different ways of celebrating a great artist’s legacy, and I suppose they have to coexist. One approach is raptly to admire his or her acknowledged masterpieces, the equivalent of making straight for Guernica or the Mona Lisa.
Of the many good reasons for seeing Akram Khan’s 2016 remake of Giselle – his work is often a headline event, for one – the most compelling is the company performing it. English National Ballet used to be the poor relation of its plusher sister national flagship in WC2. Not any more.
Is English National Ballet's current predilection for acquiring European repertoire some kind of anti-Brexit statement, or just smart brand positioning?
In the annals of ballet directors, always searching for the perfect balance between heritage programming and new work, there can rarely have been a double whammy so successful. In pairing a brand new Akram Khan Giselle with Mary Skeaping's near-perfect 1971 production in one season, English National Ballet may be setting an Orwellian future against a Romantic past, contemporary dance against the most classical ballet, but they have no jarring contrast on their hands.
Thank God for Akram Khan, English National Ballet, and Tamara Rojo. Their new Giselle, which finally arrived at Sadler's Wells this week after its Salford premiere in September, is a work of intelligence, power, beauty, and - most gratifying of all in this age of lies, damned lies and politics - stunning integrity. This is a ballet about issues that matter, made by people who know what they're doing.
Why are there so few female choreographers? Tamara Rojo, bugged by the fact that in 20 years on the ballet stage she had never danced anything choreographed by a woman, has stopped wondering and started doing something about it. ENB’s latest programme, an evening of three new commissions, sets out to show not only that women dance-makers can be just as accomplished as their better-known and vastly more numerous male counterparts, but also that their work can speak with a distinct voice.
It’s being sold as the ideal ballet for first-timers, but I would blush to introduce even my neighbour’s cat to this Carry On Up the Harem hokum. Worse, its silliness verges on offensive. When, in Rudolph Nureyev’s 1990s production of La Bayadère for Paris Opera Ballet, a chorus of blacked-up picaninnies appeared for about three minutes, you blinked and put it down to an unwise attempt at historical accuracy.
It was business as usual in the British dance world in 2015. Looking back over the year, theartsdesk's dance critics see the industry's many talented, capable people continuing to do their jobs well, but we don't recall being shaken, stirred or surprised as often as in other years, or at least not by new works: our top moments of the year are concentrated in the farewells of great dancers Sylvie Guillem and Carlos Acosta, and in classic productions of classic ballets.
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too.
When English National Ballet premiered Lest We Forget in April last year, to enthusiastic reviews, they were ahead of the pack with First World War commemoration, and the ambitious modern programme was the first sign of Tamara Rojo's determination to make the company's repertoire more contemporary. But in the intervening 18 months there have been war-themed ballet programmes aplenty, and we have all got used to the sense of dynamism that swirls around ENB under Rojo's leadership.