A light grey room. A slender woman of 50 and a 12 year old boy. Joined together like the links of a chain. Changing positions at a constant rate. One flowing movement. Never losing touch with each other. A game played by a mother and her child. A kind of tango. Sound of feet. Breathing. Faint smiles. Until suddenly the woman's hands let go of each other.
Two playwrights and a former burlesque queen travel to Louisiana to research a musical they're planning on a local Southern hero.
A dance performance salute to choreographer-dancer Lester Horton with Alvin Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade and James Truitte, all former members of his company. They perform various works by Horton.
The classic Mariinsky (Kirov) production of the greatest of all ballets. Filmed in the imperial splendor of the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. Starring Ulyana Lopatkina, Danila Korsuntsev and the breathtaking Mariinsky corps de ballet. Conducted by the great Russian maestro Valery Gergiev.
Pina Bausch created and performed Café Müller for her dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal. The dance was inspired by and based on her childhood memories of watching her father work at his café in Germany during and immediately following World War II. In this silent style featurette, Bausch shows a restaurant after closing, in which the ghosts of the departed customers stumble blindly into walls and onto chairs but fail to find one another.
The film traces Sam McKinlay’s early days as a punk skateboarder through his academic development as a conceptual artist into a highly esteemed noise practitioner whose work bridges the gap between the gallery world and the sleaze of exploitation film imagery. It documents the physical processes of his work and the distillation of visuals into sound, most notably addressing the appeal of abstraction—from the cheap effects of old monster movie makeup to the ‘masks’ created by the heavy cosmetic makeup of 1920s flapper culture and actresses like Pamela Stanford in Jess Franco’s Lorna the Exorcist (The Rita has albums or EPs named after several eurotrash actresses, including The Nylons of Laura Antonelli (2009) and Monica Swinn/Pamela Stanford (2016)).
The peasant girl Giselle discovers the true identity of her lover Albrecht – and that he is promised to another. This is one of The Royal Ballet’s most loved and admired productions, faithful to the spirit of the 1841 original yet always fresh at each revival. This performance features former Bolshoi star and now Royal Ballet Principal Natalia Osipova in a breath-taking interpretation of the title role.
Smooth Criminal
Le Lac des Cygnes
A photographer is murdered just outside a college dance. The body is found by Lee Watson, but promptly disappears, as it's being whisked from one point to another on campus by an ex-con night watchman. However, he isn't the killer, and Freddie, Dodie, Betty and Lee set out to find the culprit who put a big damper on their big event.
A chronicle of the lives of several teenagers who attend a New York high school for students gifted in the performing arts.
Showman Jerry Travers is working for producer Horace Hardwick in London. Jerry demonstrates his new dance steps late one night in Horace's hotel room, much to the annoyance of sleeping Dale Tremont below. She goes upstairs to complain and the two are immediately attracted to each other. Complications arise when Dale mistakes Jerry for Horace.
A filmed version of Aaron Copland's most famous ballet, with its original star, who also choreographed.
This thrilling, audacious, and witty production is perhaps still best known for replacing the female corps-de-ballet with a menacing male ensemble, which shattered convention, turned tradition upside down and took the dance world by storm. Filmed Live at Sadler's Wells.
The Wiener Staatsballett performs Rudolf Nureyev's world-famous choreography of "The Nutcracker." Recorded live at the Vienna State Opera, 7 October 2012.
County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.
Frederick Ashton's La Fille mal gardée (The Wayward Daughter) is one of the choreographer's most joyous and colourful creations. Inspired by his love for the Suffolk countryside, the ballet is set on a farm and tells a story of love between Lise, the daughter of Widow Simone, and Colas, a young farmer. It contains some of Ashton's most stunning choreography, most strikingly in the series of energetic pas de deux that express the youthful passion of the young lovers, performed here by Natalia Osipova and Steven McRae. The ballet is laced with exuberant good humour, and elements of national folk dance, from dancing chickens and a maypole dance to a Lancashire clog dance for Widow Simone, performed by Philip Mosley.
When rebellious street dancer Andie West lands at the elite Maryland School of the Arts, she finds herself fighting to fit in while also trying to hold onto her old life. When she joins forces with the school's hottest dancer, Chase Collins, to form a crew of fellow outcasts to compete in Baltimore's underground dance battle The Streets.
Scenes from the ballet Petrushka, performed by the Paris Opera Ballet at the National Opera Theatre.
Inspired by dark and gripping real life events, this Royal Ballet classic depicts the sexual and morbid obsessions of Crown Prince Rudolf leading to the murder-suicide scandal with his mistress Mary Vetsera. The oppressive glamour of the Austro-Hungarian court in the 1880s sets the scene for a suspenseful drama of psychological and political intrigue as Rudolf fixates on his mortality.