Would you like a lift?

Jann Parry
The Observer

San Francisco Ballet
Edinburgh Playhouse
Strictly Dandia
King's Theatre, Edinburgh

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No frills but plenty of thrills
By Debra Craine for The Times


IT’S the fag end of the Edinburgh Festival. The Fringe is over, the backpacking revellers have gone home and the Royal Mile has more or less returned to a sedate normality. But if you’re looking for buzz, you can still find it down the hill at the Edinburgh Playhouse, where San Francisco Ballet is bringing the Festival’s official dance season to a close.

Something special is on the bill: an evening devoted to the work of Christopher Wheeldon, the British dancer who left home a decade ago and became a star choreographer in America.

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San Francisco Ballet, Playhouse, Edinburgh
By John Percival for The Independent

It was brave of San Francisco Ballet and Christopher Wheeldon to accept the Edinburgh Festival's invitation to present a full evening of three of Wheeldon's works - the first time this has ever been done. One was to be a world premiere and another entirely new to this company - all in front of an unfamiliar audience with high expectations.

What has to be said straight away is that seeing his ballets brought together in this way reveals a strong and consistent development. A distinctive personal style runs through them all, yet each has its own individual quality.

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Wheeldon’s left his mark on San Francisco
Festival Dance: San Francisco Ballet, Edinburgh Playhouse, run ended
By Ellie Carr for The sunday Herald


He is ballet’s golden boy: a fresh-faced, blond-headed hope for a sometimes dusty artform. And in this earth-mover of a triple-bill for San Francisco Ballet, British-born Christopher Wheeldon (best known as resident choreographer at New York City Ballet) proves all the whispers surrounding his young talent to be true.

In There Where She Loved (originally entitled There Where She Loves), we see the softer edges of Wheeldon’s early choreographic output. Women are dressed in floaty, emerald green dresses; men in black trousers and green braces without shirts (the better to display their rippling torsos). A Chopin mazurka tinkles: love is young and fresh.

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Wheeldon keeps on turning
San Francisco Ballet’s triple-bill tribute to the coolest of British choreographers was a red-hot success, says David Dougill for The Times


As always during the final week of the Edinburgh Festival, the atmosphere was less hectic, because the Fringe had finished. But there was no sense of diminuendo about the closing event of the festival’s dance programme: the 3,000-seat Playhouse was sold out and abuzz for performances by San Francisco Ballet. Under the direction of the former New York City Ballet star Helgi Tomasson, SFB is, as Edinburgh and London know, a dazzling company: America’s third-biggest, packed with superb multinational dancers and possessed of an extensive repertory encompassing all the great names of 20th-century classical choreography.

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