Four choreographers, four works: Gauthier Dance in Swan Lakes
An homage to the familiar ballet. But while each of the four works was inspired by the classic, each is decidedly contemporary and different.
Christmas comes to the Coliseum with English National Ballet’s Nutcracker
Julia Conway, still only a Soloist, fully showed her potential, presenting a Sugar Plum Fairy variation with many new challenging technical steps
A vision of a disturbing, dystopian eco-dictatorship: Daniela Marcozzi’s monstrous
What if women could be artificially inseminated with animals, plants, minerals, emotions, natural phenomena and behaviours useful to an eco-regime?
Stuttgart Ballet’s new family-friendly Nutcracker
By Edward Clug, with sets and costumes by the acclaimed Jürgen Rose. And it’s the 85-year-old Rose’s designs that stick most in the memory
Badisches Staatsballett: Ruß – Eine Geschichte von Aschenputtel (Soot – A Retelling of Cinderella)
Bridget Briner’s complex, impressive version that relocates the story and tells it from the perspective of Livia, one of Cinderella’s stepsisters
Clean, sleek, stylish: Badisches Staatsballett in David Dawson’s Giselle
Modern yes, but still a ballet driven by emotions and imperfect people…and that in Act II especially, touches in all the right places
Delving into the recesses of Prospero’s mind: Dance Theater Heidelberg in Island
Outstandingly performed, sadness and melancholy pervades in Pérez’s intense, magnetic work that puts a new face on Shakespeare’s drama.
Translating a divergent body
David Agudelo Restrepo on a work that asks how translatable is the disabled experience to those who do not inhabit bodies with such limitations
Brilliant, high-intensity theatre: Ruination by Lost Dog
Ben Duke has found a sweet spot to set his trial of Medea. The kingdom of Hades, across the River Styx but not yet in Elysium, is just right
A Nutcracker with a difference. Christian Spuck’s Nussknacker und Mausekönig for Ballett Zürich
Complex and a real puzzle, for a while, Spuck’s ballet is very disorienting although it does become increasingly clear as the familiar starts to emerge
Real and of today: Pontus Lidberg’s Giselle
The setting may be updated but this is very much a Giselle still full of powerful feelings that reach out and touch