Judith Flanders's Blog, page 3

Akram Khan Company: iTMOi

Royal Ballet: Hansel and Gretel

Royal Ballet: Raven Girl, Symphony in C

Audrey Niffenegger, Raven Girl (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

The hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring may, for dance-goers, have inspired a certain dread. The rhythmic power of Stravinsky’s music is so compelling that, while choreographers long to work with it, the results are rarely entirely successful.

The standard English translation of Stravinsky’s title loses the ess...

The hot exhibition ticket in London is the British Museum’s Pompeii show. For the rest of the summer, many dates have only late-evening tickets available. So the expanding reach of cinema experience of live events (previously confined to opera, dance and theatre) is very welcome.

We open to hustle-bustle music, to get us in the mood for our guided exhibition tour, and a crane-shot zooms down on Peter Snow at the front entrance, telling us how exciting this all is. Then another introduction bre...

Van Gogh at Work: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Marije Vellekoop, with Nienke Bakker; translated by Ted Alkins, Michael Hoyle and Beverley Jackson (304pp. Brussels: Mercatorfonds. £40)

On May Day, thousands of Amsterdammers queued in the spring sunshine as the Van Gogh Museum formally reopened its doors after a seven-month refit, for the kind of invisible but essential works art requires: lighting, humidity-control and so on. What the museum made triumphantly visible, however, was the public face...

Death Drive: PW Talks with Judith Flanders

In The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death & Detection and Created Modern Crime historian Judith Flanders examines how 19th-century Brits dealt with – and capitalized upon – rising crime levels.

What prompted you to write this book?

I was interested in how the conditions of the 19th century led to the prolifer­ation of interest in murder and how it transformed crimes into entertain­ment. Britain was unique in that it was the first...

My great-grandmother used to say, “In the fall, leaves fall,” meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish.

Benjamin has had a longer career than most. She is, unbelievably,...

Poor Nijinsky. Poor sad, mad, vanished Nijinsky. His career was astonishingly brief, the trail that was left in his meteoric wake so persistent it is hard to believe he danced for little more than seven years.

He was born in 1889 or 1890, to Polish dancers working in Russia (Nijinsky thought of himself as Polish, but he spoke the language poorly, and spent his life in Russia before moving to France).

His astonishing talent was noted early in his student days at the Imperial Ballet School in St...

Marketing leaves nothing untouched in the twenty-first century. Tamara Rojo, the newly appointed director of English National Ballet, knows this well and proficiently plays the game. Thus for her first piece of programming, she has linked three works by an overarching title, appearing to give coherence to an evening that in reality has little.

Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort (1991) has the full panoply of Kylián tics dancegoers have come to expect: gorgeous lighting (by Kylián and Joop Caboort), cou...