In one of the worst reviews of the season, the Financial Times’ Clement Crisp finds almost nothing to like in Carlos Acosta’s Premieres Plus at the London Coliseum:
I remember visiting East Berlin when that city was still divided, and being intrigued by shops whose windows were filled with boxes which proclaimed delicacies of many kinds. A friend explained that the boxes, like the shops, were empty, and that I was being fooled by illusory goods. I feel not a little like my then companion in reporting on the return of the Carlos Acosta/Zenaida Yanowsky evening, which has been indefensibly lurking at the Coliseum…
… Yanowsky and Acosta, amid the encircling gloom, are engaged in incomprehensible encounters which convey unease, anger and sheer desperation – and who should be surprised at these emotions? They had been mine since curtain-rise. Movement is clogged with factitious dramatics, and the only question is to discover to what purpose these dancers should be indulging in such obscure and tedious activities.
… The one acceptable moment in the evening is when [Yanowsky] repeats her performance in Kim Brandstrup’s Footnotes to Ashton, which, albeit less than effective on the Coliseum stage, earns the event its star on this page. Otherwise, I found the evening to be of incomprehensible but potent awfulness.
via FT.com
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.
