AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ The Great Tamer Dimitris Papaioannou Holland Festival | Amsterdam An astronaut bounding across a moonscape, a disembodied leg crawling out of a hole, a hundred arrows sweeping the sky and piercing the floor – these are just some of the surreal scenes in Dmitris Papaioannou’s new dance theatre production The Great Tamer. The visual artist, who rose to international prominence after directing the opening of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, has long identified as more of compose

✮✮✮ Le Corsaire Hungarian National Ballet Hungarian State Opera | Budapest Le Corsaire is frothy a ballet as they come, with starry-eyed romance, swashbuckling heroism and remarkably little tension despite all the sword-fighting and slave-trading. Anna-Marie Holmes’s new production, created with ballet director Tamás Solymosi for the Hungarian National Ballet, doesn’t add much weight to this hokey concoction, but it does capitalise on the cheer and bravado that have steadily

✮✮✮ Pina Bausch/William Forsythe/Hans van Manen English National Ballet Sadler's Wells | London Prowling prima-donnas, solemn couplings, violent human sacrifice – Tamara Rojo’s latest bill for English National Ballet is underpinned by tension, divvied across three starkly different twentieth-century ballets. The diverse programme speaks to the company’s growing versatility under Rojo’s direction, as well as its expanding repertoire, which is steadily amassing prominent Europe

✮✮✮ 1/2 Don Quixote Aaron S. Watkin Staatsballet | Dresden This reworking of Marius Petipa’s much-loved Don Quixote, helmed by Aaron S. Watkin of Dresden’s Semperoper Ballet, both reinstates and revises crucial components of the Cervantes picaresque it’s based on. Among the restorations is the layered characterisation of the eponymous hero, a civilian in reality (Alonso Quixano) and knight in his fantasies (Don Quixote). This time around, however, Alonso is not an aging hidal

✮✮✮✮✮ OUR land people stories Bangarra Dance Theatre Sydney Opera House | Sydney Three separate works are featured in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s OUR land people stories, each with a distinct flavour but unified by discipline, culture and history. Independently striking in style, they tell different stories of the Indigenous experience through the medium of dance at its most progressive and adventurous. Sumptuously designed by the formidable trio of Matt Cox (lights), Jennifer I

✮✮✮ 1/2 La Sylphide Bournonville | Peter Schaufuss Queensland Ballet | London Coliseum Peter Schaufuss’ La Sylphide is very much a family affair: Schaufuss’ parents, principals with the Royal Danish Ballet, appeared in the Bournonville classic when he was a child, and he later took on the leading role of James during his own career with RDB. In 1979 Schaufuss produced the ballet for London Festival Ballet (now ENB), and come 2015 his own son and daughter are guest dancing wit

✮✮✮ b.21 Balanchine | Hans van Manen | Martin Schläpfer Deutsche Oper am Rhein | Düsseldorf Dutch ballet legend Hans van Manen's long and fertile career – during which he's created more than 120 ballets, and held resident choreographer roles at Nederlands Dans Theater and Dutch National Ballet – has rendered him a staple to the European dance scene. Among his many fans is Martin Schläpfer, artistic director of Düsseldorf's Ballett am Rhein, who has long made it a priority to

✮✮✮✮ The Winter's Tale Christopher Wheeldon The Royal Ballet | London Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale is poised to become one of the year's most celebrated ballets, and rightly so. The production excels on nearly every front, delivering an elegiac, immersive confluence of choreography, scenery and music that isolates the psychological themes of Shakespeare’s text – jealousy, regret, redemption – and expertly wrings them of their humanity. Crafting a full evening-leng

✮✮✮ LAC (After Swan Lake) Jean-Christophe Maillot Les Ballets de Monte Carlo | London Coliseum It’s impossible to view new productions of Swan Lake in isolation, such is the ballet’s historical prevalence. Jean-Christophe Maillot is the latest in a long line of choreographers to recast the dark tale through a specific lens in an effort to distinguish his version from the many that have come before it, employing a sensual filter that tinges the mood with a discernible layer of

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 MESH Tero Saarinen Saitama Arts Theater | Tokyo For Tero Saarinen, the internationally acclaimed Finnish choreographer, Japanese culture has become a creative touchstone. 20 years ago he spent time in Japan studying Butoh under the famous master Kazuo Ohno, immersing himself in Japanese cultural customs such as Aiki-do and traditional dance. Blended with his experience as a ballet dancer at the Finnish National Ballet, his work has since been enriched to produce an o