Ismene Brown | The Spectator columnists & writers

Capturing a moment | 11 April 2019

On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance 100 solos in each venue in honour of the late iconoclastic choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would have turned 100 that day. It is a spectacularly ambitious wake for the choreographer who for 70 years denied dance a dramatic or expressive face, and threw all norms of beginnings, middles and ends, of meaningful sequence or physical logic, into a bonfire of expectations. This fabulous celebration, involving dancers of the whole spectrum from contemporary to the Royal Ballet, is a declaration of intent for posterity by the Cunningham Trust, established since his 2009 death to ensure digital preservation of 86 of his dances for future performance and study.

Seeing the light | 19 October 2017

Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews. And by reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet — its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld. It’s an absurd reduction, since Ashton was quite as screwed up as MacMillan, but the notion persists of the two of them embodying opposite sides of the British ballet coin, order and chaos. Both giants left the Royal Ballet dozens and dozens of ballets, which critics recorded were amazing things.

The bitchy world of ballet

Memoirs of old men, baldly, tend to be tricky. Sir Peter Wright, one of the founding pillars of the British ballet establishment, is now 90, and a charmingly chatty man; but I’ve personally never found him reluctant to get to the point when asked. As inaugural director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet and associate director of the Royal Ballet, he has spent more than half a century inside the amazing British ballet story. I had high expectations of these copious memoirs. So it’s a great pity that his amanuensis, Paul Arrowsmith, has essentially switched on the tape recorder and let memories pour, failing to check or marshal the mass of detail into narrative significance and a coherent reading experience.

Young at heart

The second half of the Bolshoi tour brought much fresher fare than the first: following the ubiquitous warhorses Don Quixote and Swan Lake, we got three jolly nights of Moscow speciality: an iffy Shakespeare comedy nailed by superb performing, a giddy rewrite of Stalin’s favourite ballet and a breathtakingly fruity restoration of a 19th-century ballet entertainment, with pirate ships, dancing gardens and a vision of the hedonistic life of abducted women somewhat at odds with Boko Haram’s. The sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew are potentially tricky for ballet since the woman is physically dependent on the man. But Monte Carlo choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot was quite smart in his very modern-mannered 2014 creation for the Bolshoi at exploiting how body language can contradict or invert the intention of classical vocabulary, the psychology of movement.

Remembering Rosemary Butcher – the choreographer who changed the way I see dance

My ancient Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary of 1849 defines choreia as ‘a dancing, especially with joy’. The word choros has a more technical definition: a round dance, or a dance accompanied with song (hence the word chorus). From whichever word ‘choreographer’ is declared to derive, the British dancemaker Rosemary Butcher, who died last month at 69 after a career barely visible to the public, embodied the first idea in a way that I see with hindsight changed my eyes emphatically in realising the marvellous range of ways to enjoy dance-going. Choreia: ‘a dancing’ – an act of dancing, a piece of activity, rather than the choros, a dance creation. Choreia: not a joined-up circle of answers in a finished work of art, but something that hasn’t an end product in mind, jazz-like, improvisation, provoking questions uncomplicated by anything else than the pleasure of asking them.

Poetry in motion | 4 August 2016

For almost 60 years, whatever the political weather, Russia and Britain have maintained mutually assured respect as far as ballet is concerned. In October 1956, the Soviet Union finally allowed its Bolshoi troupe to appear in the west, in London, a state cultural exchange that should have entailed the debut of the comparatively green Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Russia within weeks. Owing to the inconvenient appearance of Soviet tanks in rebellious Hungary, it wasn’t until 1961 that the renamed Royal Ballet turned up in Moscow. (Khrushchev gushed admiringly, ‘Look at those girls — they might be Russian!’) I looked up The Spectator’s October 1956 review of that Bolshoi debut: some things really haven’t changed. A.V.

All in the mind | 21 July 2016

Mark Morris, the most musically communicative and naturally lyrical of choreographers of the past 30 years (and an absentee from London theatres for too long), made L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a dance masterpiece of a Handel oratorio using John Milton’s words. It was a miracle of pastoral sweetness, in rustic, human, amorous dancing, bodies singing the words and all the orchestral folderols too. It came unhelpfully to mind as I watched Mark Baldwin’s new creation for Rambert to Haydn’s oratorio using Milton’s words, The Creation. I have a lot of time for Baldwin. Under his leadership for the past 14 years, Britain’s oldest dance company has got rather good at sneaking up behind the more generously funded ships of the ballet line and landing large fish.

Double trouble | 7 July 2016

The Bolshoi Ballet’s wunderkind ballerina Natalia Osipova defied received wisdom when, in 2012, she cast off from the great Moscow company with her equally prodigious then boyfriend and partner Ivan Vasiliev to go freelance. Without the Bolshoi’s unmatched support system, its coaching and opportunities, its reputation behind her, protested the Russian media, how could she thrive? Much the same was said over here the following year when the Royal Ballet’s precocious young star, the matchlessly graceful, imperiously aquiline Sergei Polunin thumbed his nose at a cornucopia of Covent Garden leading roles and skipped off to an uncertain future trailing behind him incoherent tweets about wanting to run a tattoo parlour.

Moor four

Paradoxically, some ballet masterworks absolutely depend on tiptop performing to demonstrate how great they are. If they don’t get it, they can look like the dodgiest of curiosities — did people in those days really rate this stuff? A whole genre of fiercely zipped tragedies of feeling emerged in Britain and the US in the 1930s and 1940s, fed by Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann over here, and Martha Graham and José Limón over there; works that, unlike classical dance, require acting skills of rare force and perfect pitch. And this genre can be difficult to restage these days, when we tend to react ruthlessly to work that might look like all sobs and no steps. Limón’s 1949 The Moor’s Pavane has turned up on British stages once or twice, but I have not seen a more convincing showing of the psychological profundity and stylistic genius of this 20-minute distillation of Othello than Birmingham Royal Ballet gave last week on its excellent Shakespeare 400 triple bill.

Swan upping

Was Tamara Rojo, when she danced Swan Lake last Saturday at the Albert Hall, thinking as she shaped each phrase, ‘This will be the last time I dance this ...and this ...and this’? I wonder. She told me a few years back that she had a five-year diary to cover the rest of her dancing career, a diary ending in 2016. Akram Khan’s modern Giselle this autumn will be a Rojo role, but if at 42 she was privately saying farewell to her classical career on Saturday, she did it with the spectacular and refined artistry the public has come to expect. A woman sitting next to me complained that the 5ft 2in Rojo is too short for this ballet. To which I responded that Rojo understands the possibilities for romantic connection with her princes and for wickedness in her manipulations of a good man as few other ballerinas ever have.

The Royal Ballet and Sadler’s Wells explain how Brexit will hurt dance

What would Brexit mean to dance? Many big hitters in dance were among the 300-plus arts people who signed last month’s public letter urging the UK to remain in the EU: the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare, choreographer Akram Khan, Sadler’s Wells chief Alistair Spalding and Sir Matthew Bourne among them. I’ve asked some of them to spell out exactly would be altered by a Brexit. First, dance structurally depends on maintaining large numbers of permanent employees, whose skills require long-running and continuing group schooling. Both of these givens imply structural costs far beyond those entailed by opera or theatre. Also, as an artform, dance speaks international languages – ballet is a fusion of many countries’ traditions, contemporary dance emerges from many sources – and its companies recruit globally.

Emotional intelligence

The difference between a poor ballet of the book (see the Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein) and a good one — indeed two — was cheeringly pointed up by Northern Ballet last week, when it unveiled an intensely imagined new Jane Eyre in Doncaster and gave the London première of the efficiently menacing 1984 that I reviewed last autumn. It wasn’t really a surprise that Cathy Marston had a triumph with the Brontë —Royal Ballet-raised but Europe-bred, the choreographer has gradually developed a knack for character empathy and, crucially, a gift for externalising inner feelings in a vividly legible way. So although Jane Eyre is such a literary story, with every emotional step of the heroine so painstakingly explained by its author, Marston has danced lightly through the details, compressing it into a chamber ballet, albeit full-length.

Losing the plot | 19 May 2016

If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s accountable — to shareholders, to the fans. The director of the Royal Ballet is not a football manager. Nor is it easy to see to whom he would account for his plans and outcomes. The Royal Ballet governors are not like MotD panels unleashing Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers on the play, or select committees foaming with Tom Watsons and John Whittingdales demanding explanations for the cultural strategy. They are a group of veteran ballet chums, and it appears to be inconceivable that it is their business to turn round and see if the latest Royal Ballet production scored or not. Let alone to sack the manager. But really something has to be said after this frightful season, and given the ROH’s fondness for digital communication with the masses it would be a jolly good thing to have a live-streamed governors session where Kevin O’Hare is asked to explain why the Royal Ballet has so copiously lost the plot.

Height, weight, hair colour, race, bum size: critics must be allowed to discuss how performers look

'Dancer sees red at critic’s ginger jibes' was the Times headline on Tuesday. You can call the Royal Ballet dancer Ed Watson many things, apparently, including awkward, freakishly flexible, melodramatic, but just don’t call him ginger. Watson, who has brightened Covent Garden for 20 years in psychologically contorted acting roles and double-jointed dancing ones, is a favourite performer for many critics in many aspects (including me, quite often), but not at all to Alastair Macaulay, a distinguished figure who sharpened his teeth on the Financial Times before moving to the New York Times. Macaulay professes little time for Watson’s 'problematic, weak' dancing ('He’s simply lovely when not dancing,' he told the Times) but it was the frequent references to the dancer’s colouring that had particularly got his goat over the years, said Watson in a 40th birthday interview about his brilliant career.

Fade to grey

Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until he agreed to do a new Swan Lake is difficult to understand given the meh results. Dawson is a polite, undemonstrative choreographer, and his lack of enthusiasm has rather predictably produced an asthenic result. Obviously, abandon thoughts of white swans, or royalty, or Matthew Bourne’s brilliant, vaudevillian 1995 rewrite. This is, literally, a grey production in every way — or rather greyed-out, as if it were the ghost of something that was functional but is now impotent. Dawson doesn’t display the theatrical or choreographic skills here that would have made that disabling of older functions (enchantment, technique, musicality) a deliberate, interesting choice.

The female gaze

Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced a ballet by a woman, and wanted to see what women would produce. Just the two begged questions here. First, that female choreographers are being stifled by institutionalised sexism in the ballet establishment. Second, that female choreographers, if allowed to see the light of day, would offer a differently thought, differently imagined argument from the general tenor of those pesky male choreographers who dominate the stage. The first assumption has been swallowed whole by the luminaries and enablers of the art world who flooded Twitter after the première with ecstatic gasps, and by supportive critics who wrote approvingly that it proved that women can do choreography after all.

An American in Paris

Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a combination of exorbitant expense and a languid disdain for the little Britons with their Johnny-come-lately ballet tradition (not even one century old, let alone three and a half). So if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, it behoves Mahomet to go to the mountain. And now is the time to do it, with the ructions brought on by the arrival last year and the departure this of Natalie Portman’s husband as ballet artistic director. Benjamin Millepied is French but spent his career as a leading dancer in New York City Ballet, whose values are broadly the antithesis of the institutionalised, hierarchical Paris Opera Ballet.

Giselle v Superman

I’ve turned up at my local cinemas for quite a few of the live ballet relays that now represent a major arm of outreach to the masses by the Royal Ballet and other world companies. Wending my way through the blockbuster queues at Odeons and Empires, I’ve alarmingly often found myself among only 15 or 20 people speckling the black auditoria drinking in a rare chance to see great ballet. Tomorrow it’s the Royal Ballet’s Giselle that will beam out live to the nation with a transcendent cast in a hauntingly pretty production of the masterpiece of romantic ballet with a fantastic cast. The story is much more sophisticated and real than the average classical ballet (and shorter too). You have a young aristo disguising himself as a yokel for an amorous adventure aimed at seducing an innocent peasant girl.

Black magic

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was a witch who would leave him forever haunted, sick and bereft. You can remodel this fantasy this way and that, switch the genders, reconfigure death, sleep and hallucination, and come up with Giselle, La Sylphide, Swan Lake, La Bayadère in the 19th century, and then find Fokine, Balanchine and Ashton developing it into the 20th in Les Sylphides, Symphony in C and Ondine. Then the ballet world wakes up to emotional realism and superrational digitalism, attended by kulcha-media denunciation of classical ballet conventions as sexist, racist and old-fashioned.

Second thoughts | 17 March 2016

You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and reputations built. But seeing Kaash again last week, Akram Khan’s tremendous debut ensemble work, made when he was 26, revived at Sadler’s Wells now that he is 41 and a world name, I felt the earth move just as before. Like Athene, born fully armed from Zeus’s head, Kaash leapt astonishingly out of the modest, watchful mind of Khan, then a superb classical Indian soloist embarking on his first choreography for other dancers. One of the great pleasures of this past fortnight for a veteran dancegoer has been seeing his dazzling piece again days before the latest creation of his former mentor, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, now 55.

Sex on legs

That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my mind last week watching Birmingham Royal Ballet’s double bill of Frederick Ashton’s masterworks, The Dream and A Month in the Country. He’s the old bull, and after the Duracell rogering in Christopher Wheeldon’s Strapless the other week, the serene, sly, ceaselessly sensuous way Ashton seduces you in those ballets, with choreography that never stoops to representing sex itself, comes like a caress after a grunt. I say ‘stoops to representing sex’ not because I think doing so is low — Kenneth MacMillan was a genius at it, choreographing some viscerally exciting sex scenes, as well as some scarily abusive ones (see the imminent The Invitation at Covent Garden in May) — but because, as someone else said, dance is the vertical expression of the horizontal, and Wheeldon was far, far too horizontal.

Notes on a scandal

How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer Sargent’s magnetic, enigmatic portrait of Madame X, all alabaster skin, black dress and arrogantly sexy profile. A Mark-Anthony Turnage-commissioned score, a top-prestige Bolshoi co-production, and enough scenery to rebuild Canary Wharf. If only Christopher Wheeldon’s new Covent Garden ballet Strapless were a scandal, like the portrait itself when originally unveiled in Paris in 1884, or like Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at its première. If only it could be dubbed a tasteless exhibition of an undesirable type of female. Instead, it’s just a polite little flop, vastly over-decorated, overcomplicated, and with a whiff of evasion about it.

Unforgettable fire | 4 February 2016

How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s unfashionable, it’s only the Arts Council he has to please. When the world wants a piece of him, he has London’s Sadler’s Wells and the Roundhouse, Grenoble, Paris, Luxembourg, Montreal, Hong Kong, Taipei, Wolfsburg, Brighton, Amiens, Bruges, Amsterdam, Rheims and Leicester producers all tugging at his sleeve, offering support for the quasi-divine creation but wanting to get their spanner into the works somewhere. In which light I take my hat off to Khan. A fortnight after seeing his Until The Lions at the Roundhouse, ground down at the time by pain and dulled by medicine, and fussing over every fault, I find myself now remembering and chewing over some of those sights and impressions.

Turkish delight

I’ve seen some people saying that English National Ballet’s Le Corsaire is so out-of-date it’s risible to see it staged in the 21st century. Sex trafficking, men in black with scimitars in Istanbul, pirates trading slaves across the Mediterranean, rich fat men rubbing their jewelled paws over fresh young bodies — pshaw indeed! But I’d like to have heard Tamara Rojo, ENB’s artistic director, pitch to her board and sponsors to get the shiploads of doubloons she needed to stage it with the bling and panache its spectacle requires. An even tougher sell might have been getting her multiracial dancers on board with playing slaves and slave-dealers. So yes, I reckon Le Corsaire is bang-on current as a project. The front curtain tells us the unlikely fact that the story is based on Lord Byron’s poem about the buccaneering corsair — fortunately not a whit more respectfully than the Don Quixote ballet of about the same period is based on Cervantes.

I’m having trouble finding an anti-woman conspiracy in dance

I’m bemused by the outburst of claims that female choreographers are under-represented, held back, or discouraged by 'institutionalised sexism' from unveiling their contributions to the richness of British dance. Only a fortnight ago I was thinking about what to write for my first 2016 piece, and this was the very question on my lips. Why was English National Ballet doing a special all-women choreography programme in 2016 as a protest statement when so many of the best things made in dance last year and the previous year were by female choreographers? But I decided I’d keep that powder dry until ENB come to the stage. However, this weekend Luke Jennings, the Observer's campaigning dance critic, let rip about 'a gender imbalance so egregious, and of such long standing, that it shames the British dance establishment'.

Off the page

Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances with scientists is over. If you’ve an aversion to digital fidgets and have felt left out in recent years, you will wallow in stories galore this year. There are big new ballets coming about The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre; of which Mark Bruce’s boldly miniaturised The Odyssey, launching into Britain’s county theatres next month before fetching up at Wilton’s Music Hall, is a most alluring prospect. Last year we saw from both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, the Royal Ballet’s master-stylists of crisp abstract ballet, an enthusiastic rush to reinvent old-fashioned narrative. McGregor’s Woolf Works, despite over-reliance on the glorious sunset of the ballerina Alessandra Ferri, was a big improvement on Raven Girl, and Wheeldon’s heartfelt handling of An American in Paris proved that A Winter’s Tale was no flash in the pan.

Why did a Russian ballet dancer throw acid in his boss’s face?

The 16th June 1961 and 17th January 2013 are two indelible dates in the annals of Russian ballet. Two events that left the world gobsmacked — the escape of a Cold War fugitive and an acid attack by a subordinate on his boss — all enhanced in strangeness and sensational interest because they came out of the ballet world, a world largely closed to the rest of us. By a coincidence that’s as informative as it is lucky, two gripping documentary films emerge right now which tell these stories with dramatic effect, but also suggest a cultural link between the defection of the Kirov’s bad boy Rudolf Nureyev and the ghastly assault upon the Bolshoi Ballet artistic director Sergei Filin. Chaos is implied in both situations, whether the hyper-incompetent Soviet surveillance state that Richard Curson Smith’s Rudolf Nureyev — Dance to Freedom for the BBC elucidates, or the appallingly unruly state of affairs inside the modern Bolshoi itemised in Nick Read and Mark Franchetti’s Bolshoi Babylon for cinema release.

Bird brained

For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent majority out there who daren’t speak for fear of the Twitter ordure that would fall on them. The box office and the empty seats attest to them. You’ll have not the smallest difficulty in booking coachloads in for any of the 11 performances remaining as I write. The curious thing is that the revival of this ballet some 30 years after it last fluttered in Covent Garden came about because of overwhelming public demand, says the Royal Ballet’s artistic director Kevin O’Hare. It remains obscure how this public demand was assessed, but it seems to be the new thing in Floral Street, as the ROH is inviting more suggestions from ‘the public’ for ballets he should programme.

Ménage à trois

Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife to a litter of excellent things born out of curiosity and an unfussed love of culture, particularly music. A true artistic director (cf my complaint last time). On to the creative table at Rambert HQ this year he has thrown ideas about brass bands, a Picasso painting, something challengingly old-school for the Rambert orchestra to play, a new commissioned score or two, a bold, even foolhardy, decision to declare the Rolling Stones passé and say goodbye to Christopher Bruce’s popular but now irredeemably dated Rooster. Much intelligent trust lay behind Baldwin’s commissions to Kim Brandstrup and Didy Veldman, unveiled over the past month.