ZooNation and hip hop meet Charles Dickens in Ebony Scrooge
The dancing is terrific. Every single member of the cast bursts with energy and athleticism. Everything is so sharp, so precise, it takes your breath away
David Mead
Birmingham Royal Ballet: The Nutcracker
A ballet that wraps young and old alike in a warm, familiar fantasy, it’s a chance to snuggle down and forget the world outside for a couple of hours.
Gauthier Dance Juniors: Dream Team
All six dancers appeared in all four pieces, performing with class, commitment and bags of energy. Best, though was the way all connected with the audience
Sao Paulo Dance Company: Goecke, Binyamini, Céspedes
In Marco Goecke’s Le Chant du Rossignol, the dancers, all terrifically sharp, precise, appear from and disappear back into a deep, abyss-like upstage blackness.
Theater Pforzheim: Swan Lake
I can safely say that I have never felt a swan’s breath on the back of my neck. Until now. Because that’s precisely what happened during Act Two…
One evening, two worlds: Dance x 2 by Dance Theater Heidelberg
‘Crash: reassembled’ by Astrid Boons, a reworking of her 2020 piece, and ‘IT’S NIGHT AGAIN’, a new work by Italian choreographer duo Panzetti/Ticconi
The scene of tomorrow: International Solo Dance Theater Festival Stuttgart winners on tour
The six works on this year’s tour certainly live up the requirement to be “original, imaginative, unique and… display unusual achievement.”
Compagnie Leïla Ka: Triptyque
Leïla Ka’s choreography is sharply incisive and precise, requires great core strength and physicality, but also leaves plenty of space for vulnerability
The Royal Ballet: Perspectives (Balanchine, Marston, Peck)
“A triple-bill that’s classy and classic… Perspectives really is a cracking evening. Maybe too much of a good thing is sometimes not a bad thing at all.”
S-E-D/Sharon Eyal: Into the Hairy
Eyal’s Into the Hairy for her company, S-E-D, depicts a strange world, one whose inhabitants are disconcertingly humanoid, but not quite human
Osipova/Linbury
A super programme, the highlight being the return of Jo Strømgren’s The Exhibition, a tale of the accidental meeting of two people in a gallery