‘Could you tell these were by women choreographers?’ asked my neighbour during an interval of English National Ballet’s She Said. Good question. How would you know?Could you tell that the opera I saw the following evening – Lucia di Lammermoor – was directed by a woman, Katie Mitchell? Good question – but impossible. Start slapping labels on aesthetic qualities – feminine/masculine – and you’re … [Read more...]
Act of worship
Status update: Waiting for Godot and I have decided to stop seeing each other. I guess it won’t come as a surprise. Things have been pretty bad for a while. Looking back, I can’t remember when we were last happy. Or even interested in each other. In my head, I have a perfect version of Samuel Beckett’s play: not in the details of staging, just one that has some of the effect I’ve had when … [Read more...]
What did you do in the war, mummy?
How do you stage warfare? In a year commemorating the centenary of the First World War, the conflict resists direct dramatisation. Naturalism struggles to capture the scale, and bathos might demean the dead. Dance embodied yet abstract vocabulary, a wordless form offers an opportunity to articulate the unspeakable. The choreographers in Lest We Forget, English National Ballet’s profoundly wrought … [Read more...]