Confirmation today of the astonishing news from Russia - Nacho Duato will indeed become the new director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St Petersburg’s second company, from the New Year. The Spanish contemporary choreographer will be the first foreigner to lead a Russian ballet company for more than a century.
What makes a good piece of theatre? Is it the atmosphere generated? Is it the acting? Or is it the ability to communicate ideas clearly? I don’t mind if sometimes I can’t hear or understand words. In the past, I have been overwhelmed by Polish versions of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. I have watched open-mouthed at Kabuki without surtitles and when Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma was first seen in this country, in Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre seasons, back in the Sixties, you hardly needed to understand Spanish to be so desperately moved by the sense of yearning emanating from a production played out on a giant trampoline that looked like an enormous cat’s cradle. Lorca, it turns out, is the chosen author for a new production that has its own issues.
Rape, marauding soldiers, peasants on the warpath and a flash hero - are we at the Bolshoi’s Spartacus once again? No, we’re at the Mikhailovsky Ballet down the road at the Coliseum where a rather more Erroll Flynn-type spectacle is being offered, Laurencia.
Spain and Venezuela are two countries divided by a common language - in dance and music, as well as in culture. Hence the hook for Paco Peña’s latest production, Flamenco sin fronteras, which while wearing a faintly anthropological air also packs a lot of ebullient performance skills and talking-points. Contrasting “high” Cordoban flamenco (and in Charo Espino and Angel Muñoz, Peña provides two of the most refined dancers to be found in any style) with gutsy, African-influenced flamenco from Caracas, makes for a direct comparison of sex and allure, earth and fire, of relaxed, open-hipped, four-square Afro-Latin drumbeat and the tautly strung, buttock-clenching, almost oriental mysteries of Iberian flamenco-guitar rhythm.
In retrospect, deciding on a quick in-and-out trip to the Sónar festival was a slightly silly idea. Not because there was any problem with the event, or with getting there, or because I had any difficulty chucking an all-nighter then making it to my plane at 11am, though. Quite the opposite: it was a silly idea because a small taster of one of the best-organised music festivals I have ever been to could only make me deeply hacked off that I wasn't going to be there for the whole thing.
Picasso the genius, the sensualist, the womaniser, the priapic beast. This much we think we know of the great Spanish artist. But how about Picasso the political activist? Picasso the supporter of women’s causes? Picasso the… feminist? Oh, yes, that Picasso. In a landmark Liverpool exhibition focusing on the years 1944 to his death in 1973, and bringing together 150 works from around the globe, Picasso becomes all of these things.
