City of a Thousand Trades – Birmingham Royal Ballet Click here for tickets This is an unusual love letter to a place. City of a Thousand Trades is a moving tribute to Birmingham, choreographed by Miguel Altunga for the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Carlos Acosta, the BRB’s director, commissioned this dedication to the UK’s industrial West Midlands city to celebrate the city’s diverse cultural and industrial heritage. Co-directed by Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s Madeleine Kludje, this dance piece is set to an original score by Mathias Coppen that features a live band playing on a platform on stage. The score weaves classical music with the explosive percussion of Heavy Metal riffs, paying homage to Birmingham’s legacy as the birthplace of heavy metal. In City of a Thousand Trades, 12 dancers create moody vignettes of the city’s history overlaid with the words of Birmingham’s poet laureate Casey Bailey. Dancers carry large metal poles, move masses of concrete, tell stories of the city’s residents, and bring to life both the triumphs and tribulations of their beloved city. Dancers include Rosanna Ely, Callum Findlay-White, Brandon Lawrence, Gus Payn, Darel Perez, Matilde Rodrigues, and Javier Rojas. Blues for an Alabama Sky – National Theatre Click here for tickets This play opened to rave reviews in its recent National production, better than it garnered at its earlier productions across the Atlantic. The stunning performances, several Olivier-nominated, are what made the difference to Pearl Cleage’s play about a nightclub singer from the 1930s. It is set in New York in a big old Harlem house where every inhabitant has dreams of artistic fame and success. But, following a decade of creative explosion, the Harlem Renaissance is starting to feel the bite of the Great Depression. In the face of hardship and dwindling opportunity, on the morning after yet another roistering night out in which Angel has been fired from her nightclub job, she and her friends battle to keep their artistic dreams alive. But, when Angel (a strong performance from Samira Wiley) falls for a stranger from Alabama, their romance forces the group to make good on their ambitions, or give in to the reality of their time. Those of us obsessed with the period can’t resist the play’s sly mentions of the celebrities who inhabited the Harlem neighbourhood's consciousness such as Adam Clayton Powell, Langton Hughes and the central but invisible character of Josephine Baker across the pond in Paris. This is an old-fashioned melodrama with insistent touches of Tennessee Williams and Ibsen. Lynette Linton directs a startling revival of this extraordinary play, which received three 2023 Olivier Award nominations for Giles Terera as Best Actor, Sule Rimi as Best Supporting Actor and another for Best Costume Design. Akram Khan’s Creature - ENB Ballet on Demand Click here to rent Creature is a genre-busting collaboration that fuses film and contemporary dance, based on the acclaimed English National Ballet production, choreographed by Akram Khan and directed by Academy Award-winning director Asif Kapadia. In a dilapidated former Arctic research station, Creature (performed by Jeffrey Cirio, ENB Lead Principal) is unknowingly enlisted by a military brigade into an experimental programme. Creature meets and falls in love with Marie (Erina Takahashi, also Lead Principal for ENB), a cleaner who shows him kindness and compassion; together they dream of escape. This vivid cinematic experience is a beautiful, tragic tale of an outsider’s search for belonging, the insatiable desires of the powerful, and the enduring hope found in human connection and compassion. Olivier Award winning choreographer Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists currently working. In just over 22 years he has created a body of work that has contributed significantly to the arts in the UK and abroad. As a choreographer, Khan has developed a close collaboration with English National Ballet. He created the short piece Dust, part of the Lest We Forget programme, which led to an invitation to create his own critically acclaimed version of the iconic romantic ballet Giselle. Creature is Khan’s third work for English National Ballet. Asif Kapadia is best known for his trilogy of films exploring the price of fame, Amy, Senna, and Diego Maradona. His debut fiction feature, The Warrior won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film of the Year. He knows his music and was executive producer on the critically acclaimed music series 1971: The Year Music Changed Everything. Sadly, Creature is currently available only in the UK. Stay tuned, everybody else, I’ll let you know when it becomes available worldwide. 3-day Rental 7.99 The Art of the Copyist – Met Museum Click here to watch In this short film, the American artist Jas Knight describes the reasons and techniques behind his background work as a copyist of a great portrait of Juan de Pareja by Diego Velazquez in the Met Museum. As his copy takes shape we can see, through the eyes of another accomplished artist, how the Spanish master Velazquez achieved his mastery. Velázquez probably painted this portrait of his enslaved assistant in Rome during the early months of 1650. According to one of the artist's biographers, when this landmark of western portraiture was first put on display it "received such universal acclaim that in the opinion of all the painters of different nations everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth." Months after depicting his sitter in such a proud and confident way, Velázquez signed a contract of manumission that would liberate him from bondage in 1654. From that point forward, Juan de Pareja worked as an independent painter in Madrid, producing portraits and large-scale religious subjects. Jas was born in Hartford CT. His talent for drawing was recognized at an early age. He sold his first painting at age seven and had his first one-man show at the age of eight. He went on to receive numerous awards and later went to study at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He currently lives and paints in Brooklyn, NYC. Let’s Face The Music and Dance – Astaire and Rogers Click here to watch Lovers of Fred and Ginger can argue happily for hours about which is their favourite number. It’s like trying to decide which is your favourite child. As an experiment, I tried separating the dances from the songs to see which of their pure dance numbers left the most lasting impression. This is the one that came top in my catalogue of epic performances in dance history. Not the most acrobatic, not the most innovative, not the most technical, not the most difficult, not the most complex. It is, however, the most romantic and, although they weren’t trying for this effect, the most sexually charged. Even without Irving Berlin’s irresistible lyrics, perfectly attuned to the sweeping strings of his music, this is the one. Let’s Face The Music and Dance was written by Berlin in 1936 for the film musical Follow The Fleet and has been sung and danced subsequently by everyone from Nat King Cole to Diana Krall but never, I suggest, with quite the same romantic heft as in the original. By the way, watch carefully, don’t get carried away, and notice that the entire dance is filmed on a single camera shot with the cameraman ‘dancing’ with Astaire and Rogers so that he is invisible unless you are looking for perfect camerawork, which this is.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
May 2024
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