Birmingham Royal Ballet: The Dream & A Month In The Country, Birmingham
Birmingham Royal Ballet joins in 2016’s Shakespeare celebrations with seven Bard-inspired ballets this season, from Cranko’s The Taming Of The Shrew (16 to 18 Jun), to David Bintley’s Shakespeare Suite and a new work by Jessica Lang based on the sonnets (22 to 26 Jun). It kicks off with a revival of Frederick Ashton’s 1964 ballet in which A Midsummer Night’s Dream is brilliantly compressed into three worlds: the human lovers, the rude mechanicals and the prettily amoral fairies. It is coupled here with Ashton’s 1976 adaptation of Turgenev’s A Month In The Country.
Birmingham Hippodrome, Wed to 20 Feb
Flamenco Festival London
Sadler’s Wells’s annual flamenco season promises, as ever, to provide a vivid overview of the great Spanish art form, embracing practitioners of flamenco puro as well as the experimentalists and the modernisers. This year’s programme opens with Voces, Suite Flamenca (Tue to 20 Feb), a work new to the UK stage. Ballet Flamenco’s Sara Baras is celebrated for her brilliant footwork and stage charisma, as well the inventiveness with which she refreshes the traditions of the form. In Voces, she pays homage to artists such as Paco de Lucía who have influenced her work. The cast of 15 includes José Serrano, Baras’s long-time partner both on and off the stage.
