Dance & ballet news

• Luke Jennings: the best dance of 2015

  13-12-2015 10:30
  
  Enthralling dance came in tiny packages, as productions triumphed on a shoestring, a cliff-face, a grain of sand…
  • Observer critics’ reviews of the year in full2015 was a year in which small repeatedly proved itself to be beautiful. Everywhere, micro-scale productions enthralled audiences. Pieces such as Theo Clinkard’s Chalk, which reimagined the stage as a vertiginous Sussex cliff-face, or Ben Duke’s Paradise Lost, which gave us the creation and fall of man as a
  
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• Carlos Acosta: A Classical Selection review – high-wire fun

  13-12-2015 09:00
  
  Coliseum, London
  The virtuoso dance star approaches his final farewell with an evening of short worksOnly rarely does a male ballet dancer truly capture the public’s imagination. When it happens, as it happened with Carlos Acosta – and before him Nureyev, Nijinsky and others – it’s only partly about virtuosity. It’s also a matter of historical timing. Nijinsky and Nureyev enthralled the west with their exotic sensuality at moments in time, a half-century apart, when
  
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• Sleeping Beauty review – Matthew Bourne’s show is flawed but enchanting

  13-12-2015 08:59
  
  Sadlers Wells, London
  A traditional take on the story of Aurora and the dark fairy Carabosse suffers from the lack of a believable love story, but has a suitably magical feelMatthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty is subtitled A Gothic Romance, and from Lez Brotherston’s brooding sets to the plot’s preoccupation with issues of blood, Bourne is true to his vision. The set-up, with Princess Aurora (Ashley Shaw) cursed by the dark fairy Carabosse (Adam Maskell), is traditional. The big r
  
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