Natalia Osipova is the artistic director of this show and a principal dancer at The Royal Ballet, London. Pure Dance is a fine programme of seven short pieces varying in tone and form from contemporary dance to classical ballet. Osipova dances in six of the works and the seventh, a solo performed by David Hallberg, a principal guest artist at The Royal Ballet, is atmospheric and performed with provoking sensitivity. The choreography throughout the show is consistently excellent and the music … [Read more...]
Reviews of Dance in London - Reviews of Dance at Sadler's Wells
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BalletBoyz’ Them/Us at Sadler’s Wells
The first half of the show, a thirty-minute piece choreographed by the dancers is titled Them. It’s not boring because Balletboyz are fabulous dancers and for this reason, it’s enough to watch but the work itself feels shallow. It’s hard to work out what the point is except as a virtuoso display. The cube doesn’t add much either. Andrew Ellis, the lighting designer contributes occasional intense scenes of colour which are beautiful. The music composed by Charlotte Harding provides necessary substance to the work as it sweeps from gorgeous strings to strings with a driving beat that accompany the best section of dance, a virtuoso solo by dancer, Benjamin Knapper. Them has a running time of only 30 minutes which is just about right, not overlong.
Notwithstanding the limitations of Them the second half of the show, Us, after the interval is so satisfying you leave elated, amazed all over again by the impact of great contemporary dance when it happens in front of you again.
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INALA with the Soweto Gospel Choir and International Dancers | Review
It is more than thirty years since the South African male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo achieved global fame through the unorthodox route of collaboration with an American rock star. The result of that was the landmark album Graceland, made controversial by the fact that the star in question, Paul Simon, appeared to be breaking the cultural boycott imposed by the United Nations on South Africa because of that country’s apartheid policy. In the much altered political climate of the … [Read more...]
Russell Maliphant Company’s Silent Lines | Review
Silent Lines is a new work choreographed by Russell Maliphant and performed by his dance company. It’s an abstract work relying on movement, music and clever light effects to absorb the audience which it successfully does. Much more so than his other recent work, The Golden Thread. Running at an hour Silent Lines opens with five dancers performing as indistinct figures bound together moving between dappled light and shade as if underwater through sunshine and shadow. The costumes by Stevie … [Read more...]
Dangerous Liaisons an original dance adaptation | Review
This dance production of Dangerous Liaisons is set both at the time of writing and into the near future - perhaps a year or two leading up to the 92nd Academy Awards, not to take place until 9th February 2020, and then its aftermath. To set all the dancing in context, a relatively brief preamble in the form of a news magazine programme called ‘All Access Hollywood’ introduces a large number of characters quite speedily, with interviews with Audrey Gercourt (Hannah Roberts), a movie director, … [Read more...]
Breakin’ Convention Presents at the Lilian Baylis Studio
If surreal slapstick clown Bill Irwin and gravity-defying danseur Sergei Polunin had a love child, who was raised by suave French actor Jean Reno in a house built with the economic absurdity of Samuel Beckett, you’d have Yaman Okur. Whilst pianist Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven opens the act with a commanding turn at the grand piano, looking a groovy kind of gangly, like a Gallic Steven Merchant, the arrival of Okur - foreshadowed by a sort of a phantasmagorical presence of the same wardrobe - … [Read more...]