Dance
The Manchester Review

Manon | Manchester Opera House | reviewed by Aminah Barnes

Manon | Manchester Opera House The Parisian tale of desire, decadence, and doom was produced by the late Kenneth MacMillan in 1974 and was his third full-length production as resident choreographer for the Royal Ballet. Manon followed his widely successful Romeo and Juliet (1965) and his second masterpiece, Anastasia (1971), which was met with a […]

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The Manchester Review

Everything that happened and would happen, Manchester International Festival, Oct 10-21, reviewed by Ronan Long

The latest product of German avant-garde impresario, composer and director Heiner Goebbels premiered at the recent Manchester International Festival preview. Everything that Happened and Would Happen was held in the cavernous, derelict Mayfield Station, the performance telling a history of sorts, an esoteric, chaotic history of Europe. This absurdist compression of the 19th and 20th […]

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The Manchester Review

Acosta Danza, The Lowry, reviewed by Hazel Shaw

Acosta Danza, produced by Sadler’s Wells and Valid Productions; The Lowry, 12 October 2017. Carlos Acosta has used his fame and popularity a ballet dancer to turn the spotlight towards the next generation of Cuban dancers through his company Acosta Danza. Their first UK tour brings a taster of their talent and distinctively playful approach […]

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The Manchester Review

Giselle, Palace theatre, reviewed by Zoe Gosling

Giselle, English National Ballet, directed and choreographed by Akram Kham, co-produced by Manchester International Festival and Sadler’s Wells; September 27 2016. The English National Ballet’s re-working of the 1841 ballet sees its landscape change from a peasant village to an industrial workhouse, where Giselle (Alina Cojocaru) and her community become the redundant migrant workers of […]

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The Manchester Review

Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell

Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, by Itzik Galili; The Lowry, September 28 2016.   The Rambert returns to Manchester with a winning combination: a triple bill, a premiere and a raucous audience. The evening opened with the premiere of Flight, choreographed by Malgorzata Dzierzon, herself a dancer with the Rambert between 2006 and […]

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The Manchester Review

Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry, reviewed by Hazel Shaw

Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry; May 13, 2016 One of the most striking things about this performance on Carlos Acosta’s farewell tour is how little of it he spent on-stage. Not that I’m complaining, the evening was ably filled by the company of Cuban dancers touring with Acosta, and every one of the […]

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The Manchester Review

barbarians: A Trilogy by Hofesh Shechter, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

HOME, Thursday 28th January Hofesh Shechter’s barbarians is a postmodern work in the strict sense. Its dance and music are constructed by bricolage and pastiche and these serve as the hyperactive, playful backdrop against which he explores anxieties about the possibilities of making art and particularly about the difficulty of depicting love. This intellectualism is […]

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The Manchester Review

1984, Northern Ballet at The Palace Theatre, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell

1984, Northern Ballet, The Palace Theatre, October 15 2015 As a cultural colossus of a novel, reworking 1984 will never be easy in any media. With modern ballet being better known for its abstract movement than defined storytelling, it must be one of the hardest. Although doing a better job than many others before him, […]

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The Manchester Review

Dark Arteries, Rambert at The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell

Rambert, ‘Dark Arteries,’ ‘The Three Dancers,’ ‘Terra Incognito’ at The Lowry, September 30 2015 A word of warning: ever since I saw Mark Baldwin’s ‘Eternal Light’ aged 15, I have dreamt of being in the Rambert. There was just something about the so cleverly choreographed and very balletic Contemporary dance, with the huge side of […]

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The Manchester Review

Swan Lake, Birmingham Royal Ballet at The Lowry, by Elizabeth Mitchell

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, The Lowry, September 23 2015 With Swan Lake being such a classic, it ways runs the danger of being a safely enjoyable but slightly dull way to spend an evening. However, David Bintley has once more pulled it out of the bag with his energetic direction of Peter Wright’s masterpiece. […]

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The Manchester Review

Yesterday, Jasmin Vardimon Dance Company, Peacock Theatre, London

I don’t like dance performances which require you to read the programme in order to understand what’s going on. I didn’t buy a programme (mostly, to be honest, because the drinks were so expensive at the bar I didn’t have any cash left). So when the lights came up on a girl towering above a sea […]

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