Artswrap

The Culture Cafe: 15/05/2012

Clare English discusses the enormous benefits of creative activity in later life.

Ballet Preljocaj: Snow White - review

Angelin Preljocaj's Snow White starts out in unpromising style. The prologue, in which the young queen dies in solitary childbirth, is visually bombastic and dramatically implausible.

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet, at Sadler's Wells - Seven magazine review

Scottish Ballet made a rare trip south last week for the London premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams’s crude blend of sleaze and sentiment offers rich pickings for the ballet stage: meaty starring roles and countless pretexts for duets and trios.

Snow White, Ballet Preljocaj, Sadler's Wells, review

As the wicked Queen famously asked, Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who is the most irksomely mannered French-Albanian choreographer to have tackled the Snow White story in recent years and brought it to Britain even though come to think of it what with all these Hollywood films about Snow White popping up like mushrooms after the rain one wonders if we really needed it at all?

This week's cultural highlights: from Snow White to the Cribs

Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now

Snow White, Ballet Preljocaj

Hollywood may want to take a leaf out of Angelin Preljocaj’s book when attempting to rework fairytales for a new generation.

Birmingham Royal Ballet - Three Short Works, International Dance Festival Birmingham 2012, Crescent Theatre, Birmingham

Birmingham’s International Dance Festival provides an amazing umbrella for movement of every kind from hip-hop to Cuban-Latino. Therefore it is an appropriate stage for experimental work such as Birmingham Royal Ballet’s 9-5, a nightmare piece by BRB’s company dancer, Kit Holder, premiered and set to music for a bad headache, by Mistabishi, Matthew Herbert and William Byrd.

Tamara Rojo: 'I danced in private for George Osborne'

It’s hard to imagine Tamara Rojo, prima ballerina at the Royal Ballet, giving private dances to select individuals. Naturally authoritative, with a polished yet unfussy beauty, Rojo is used to a grand stage. So the idea that last year she and members of the Royal Ballet company performed for Chancellor George Osborne, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and a group of potential arts donors at Downing Street brings up incongruous images of a woman of poise in a stuffy wood-panelled room trying chaînés over the walnut floors and grands-jetés around a long wooden dinner table.

Breakin' Convention, at Sadler's Wells, Seven magazine review

This year's offerings at Breakin' Convention, the annual hip hop festival, were mostly impressive.

Ballet Preljocaj: Snow White; La Fille mal gardee - review

Sadler's Wells; Royal Opera House; both London Angelin Preljocaj is one of the grands noms of French choreography. Of Albanian origin, he trained in classical ballet before turning to contemporary dance and founding his own company in 1984. Since then he has been much honoured with awards for grand-scale productions like Le Parc (1994), an exploration of the formal eroticism of the 17th century court, and Romeo et Juliette (1990), set in an eastern European totalitarian state. His work is characterised by its psychological acuity and often very beautiful imagery. Read more »

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