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3 weeks ago | 
thetimes.com | Neil Fisher |Debra Craine
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
When you have a ballet as precious as Frederick Ashton’s 1948 staging of Cinderella you want to show it off, especially when it’s had such a sumptuous makeover. So, not quite two years since its redesign, it takes over the Royal Opera House for Christmas. The Royal Ballet’s three-act production is grand and magical, a fairytale writ large and brought vividly to life. Tom Pye’s set designs are all about size.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
It’s unusual to see two choreographers sharing a rehearsal — they just don’t work in pairs. But English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker needs two of them. So here’s Aaron Watkin, the company’s artistic director, marshalling a large group of dancers — crowd control, he calls it — as they rehearse the beginning of Act II, in which Clara and the Nutcracker arrive at the Land of Sweets.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
Akram Khan’s career as a choreographer has taken him to many places artistically, from working with Kylie Minogue and Florence and the Machine to collaborations with Sylvie Guillem and Juliette Binoche. He has created extraordinary works for his own contemporary dance company and found success in the ballet world. But now, at the age of 50, he presents a piece that takes him back to his roots in Indian classical dance.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
There are two audiences for Wayne McGregor’s new production for the Royal Ballet. Those who are steeped in the dystopian universe of Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, and those who know nothing of her MaddAddam trilogy. If you are an Atwood fan, you might love the ballet’s impressive sense of atmosphere in creating an apocalyptic world where a pandemic has wiped out humankind. But if you haven’t read the source novels, you might wonder what on earth is going on.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Clive Davis |Dominic Maxwell |Richard Morrison |Debra Craine
Whether it’s theatre, ballet, opera or Julian Clary as Peter Pan, this is the time of year when the nation’s impresarios let their hair down and push the buttons marked “gaudy”, “silly” and “twinkly tutus”.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
Given that the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is famous for her austere and uncompromising approach to dance, it comes as a surprise to find her letting go of her artistic inhibitions in Exit Above. Inspired by the early blues of the American Robert Johnson and performed by a multitalented 13-strong cast, this freewheeling 2023 creation takes De Keersmaeker back to the roots of dance via the simple act of walking. But of course it’s about far more than that.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
It’s billed as the world’s “first filmed-for-Imax ballet” and if that’s true you wonder why it’s taken so long. Swan Lake, with its shimmering vista of beautiful ballerinas in white feathered tutus, is tailor-made for the big screen experience. Already this year the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet have brought their productions to cinemas around the UK (with the Royal bringing theirs back in February next year).
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
This evening was born out of an idea by Joseph Sissens, a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, who describes it as “a love letter to my community”. As a biracial artist — he’s of British-Jamaican heritage — Sissens wanted to celebrate “black and brown excellence” in an art form notorious for its overwhelmingly white bias.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Debra Craine
The Royal Ballet’s new mixed bill Encounters unites the work of four contemporary choreographers. Some of the ballets we have seen before and know them to be fine additions to the repertoire, but the big reveal is the new creation by the American Pam Tanowitz. Or Forevermore began life as a short pas de deux for Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell. Here it forms the climax to a much more ambitious work for 14, set to the multicoloured rhythms of Ted Hearne’s music.
