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The Evening Standard demands an end to the practice of burying children and babies in mass paupers’ graves
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It’s Day’s night, and no one is going to spoil her story
A Sentimental Journey
Film
This is a shocking, replenishing film, not to be missed
Green Zone
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It is great that Bruno Loubet is back — and at prices that are eminently fair
Bistro Bruno Loubet
The action and direction are superb and the acting good, but the plot is so pathetic it defies belief
Wonderful - beautifully acted and gloriously funny, particularly Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw
Probably the most important photography exhibition london has ever seen
London,
Sarah Frater's rating
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Let’s twist again: the Forsythe Company at work
William Forsythe is usually called a radical in that he’s long since abandoned ballet’s classical harmonies and theatre’s linear conventions. Yet for all his extremities, the choreographer’s purpose remains intensely humane, albeit with painfully disruptive means.
You see it clear in You Made Me a Monster, a 50-minute choreographic installation that opened Sadler’s Wells’s two-and-a-bit-week retrospective of his work. The audience don’t sit in their seats, nor are they passive observers.
Instead they are on stage taking part in a Blue Peter-like game of paper sculpture. On 13 tables are piles of brown card, and you soon recognise they’re those flat-pack paper skeleton kits. Only instead of assembling the femurs and fibulas into human harmony, we’re asked to twist and contort them into osteo disarray.
Then three dancers hurtle around the space, their bodies wracked with palsy, their cries electronically distorted. Then comes the realisation, revealed in a projected text, that Forsythe’s young wife died of cancer. After her death he assembled a paper skeleton without the instructions. The result was a model of grief, which the audience unknowingly recreate.
With 18 writhing dancers and a relentless dialogue of distress, Decreation is no easier. It’s like watching magnets spongily repel each other only to snap shut, then twist and struggle to separate. Forsythe is an emotional lodestone of the bleakest kind.
Focus on Forsythe until 10 May. 0844 412 4300. www.sadlerswells.com
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
