© Asya Verzhbinsky Rambert 'Visions Fugitives' reviews Rambert 'Ghost Dances' reviews Rambert '21' reviews recent Rambert reviews RB 'Les Saisons' reviews RB 'Scenes de Ballet' reviews RB 'Song of the Earth' reviews recent RB reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

Islington saw the London debut of Kylie Minogue's dance maker, Rafael Bonachela's 21 featuring both a backing track and front cloth projection by the diminutive superstar. It is a substantial work exploring the complexity of modern stardom, minimalist but dense with detail, apparently random but structured with an hypnotic discipline. An important statement of modern Britart, thankfully without the rotting cow's head.

Rafael Bonachela's 21, including Kylie Minogue
© Asya Verzhbinsky

Hans van Manen's Visions Fugitives to Prokofiev's haunting musical sketches, is almost too beautiful to be real. Rarely does a choreographer capture music's magic so deftly. The stage is a sparkling arena in which six dancers seem to do very little, but leave you gasping for more. Then there is Christopher Bruce's Ghost Dances, hailed quite rightly as a masterpiece. A tribute to South America's countless disappeared political prisoners, a group of villagers celebrate the moods that make us human like love, hope, silliness and courage, to hauntingly delicate flute folk music. With ruthless inevitability, death claims them one by one. Bruce's mastery is in the three male skull headed reapers, beautiful and bestial, whose anti-life is nourished by delight in destruction. Mark Baldwin is Rambert's new director and takes his company around the UK from September - book early.

Hans Van Manen's Visions Fugitives
© Asya Verzhbinsky

If that was not enough, the Royal Ballet premiered David Bintley's Les Saisons in Covent Garden. Glazunov's 1900 score was written for the Russian Imperial Ballet, but Bintley, our greatest neo-classical choreographer, gives the grandeur a French chic with Charles Quiggin's spiky headdresses and a saccharine flavour to the dancers flirtatious engagement with the audience. And what dancers. Five superbly confident female soloists, led by Jaimie Tapper, are Winter; butter yellow Alina Cojocaru is Spring; a statuesque Jonathan Cope partners a glowing summer's Isabel McMeekan while an autumnal Martin Harvey enthusiastically leads his chestnut headed men. Richly satisfying steps superbly executed by first class dancers while Degas Foyer de la Danse is never far away.

Ashton's Scenes de Ballet precisely fits Cojocaru's fragile perfection, his steps sophisticated complexity flow effortlessly from her born to dance body. Created in 1948, Ashton's cocktail party feel is so cool in our clipped, English sort of way, but it is a style as co-founder that he embodied into the company's soul.

As if that was not enough Tamara Rojo, Carlos Acosta and Cope led Kenneth MacMillan's mammoth dance epic, Song of the Earth. And riveting they were, too. Over an hour long, composer Gustav Mahler's setting of six Chinese poems, explores the sweet melancholy of too much wine, lost youth and approaching death, gossamer concepts even in print, but how much resonance will be lost when fleshed out in muscle and bone? Thanks to MacMillan's genius and the three principal dancer's artistic depth, the answer is - much is gained. Acosta as The Messenger of Death is a self-contained force of nature, hypnotic to watch and utterly understandable, Cope is so tuned to movement and music he speaks volumes almost without trying while Rojo's heart effortlessly plugs straight in to ours.

What dancers, what ballets, what a week to remember.