Step by Step Guides


  • Bel, Jérôme

    Jérôme Bel is the naughty French philosophe of contemporary dance, a mischievously entertaining conceptualist who is less interested in movement than in messing with your head.


  • Childs, Lucinda

    Look at a portrait of Lucinda Childs’s face (“like Catherine Deneuve crossed with Katharine Hepburn” according to the New York Times), and you get a portrait of her choreography: a clear, no-frills beauty; sharp intelligence that’s a little unreadable; great underlying structure.


  • China, National Ballet of

    The National Ballet of China has been a barometer to the changing fortunes of its country: it imported Soviet ideas before forging its own patriotic style, weathered the Cultural Revolution and adapted to the changing ideologies of state control and the free market – and is now a growing presence on the world stage.


  • Teshigawara, Saburo

    His company’s name means “crow”, but Saburo Teshigawara is more of a magpie – bringing together different elements of movement, text, design and lighting into performances of symbols and senses.


  • Taylor, Paul

    Although neither a pioneer nor a radical of American modern dance, Paul Taylor is still one its pillars, with a keen eye for both the light and dark side of human nature.


  • Manen, Hans van

    Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen has been called the Mondrian of ballet, the Versace of ballet, the Pinter of ballet and the Antonioni of ballet – but really, he is just the Hans van Manen of ballet, with a distinctive personal style that mixes formal austerity and glassy elegance with erotic charge.


  • Frutos, Javier de

    A maverick, an iconoclast and a heretic, Javier de Frutos is an itinerant choreographer, both personally and professionally. Wandering not just between companies but between the fields of dance, musicals, theatre and film, he carries his favoured themes with him: beauty and bestiality, desire and death, dissidence.


  • Tharp, Twyla

    Twyla Tharp is America’s crossover dance queen. High-minded but plain-talking, she melds classical ballet with modern dance, avant-garde experiment with Broadway pizzazz, technical rigour with off-the-cuff attitude, uptown glamour with downtown grit; above all, art with commerce.


  • Rainer, Yvonne

    An artist who is anti-art, an activist who is also an aesthete, Yvonne Rainer is a combative, contrarian and confounding figure whose work has crossed from choreography to cinema and back again. She has never been popular but she has, for a very long time, been influential.


  • Jones, Bill T

    Bill T Jones is a mover and a shaker: he wants to dance, and he wants to stir things up. As a black, gay, HIV-positive man, he is far more than a survivor. He thrives on the questions his position raises.