Steve Mackey’s Cairn seemed at last to provide Jeanrenaud with more to do cellistically octave hops

Steve Mackey’s Cairn seemed at last to provide Jeanrenaud with more to do “cellistically”, octave “hops” plus harmonic, providing a more apt fit to the visuals (again Moruzzi), which seemed to show the long fingers of Jeanrenaud picking up stones on a beach against her “live” long fingers stretched to reach the octave – a nice conceit. Escalay, by Hamza El Din, featured the cello as oud, the tuning non-tempered, the rhythmic Arab/African cycles providing a patterned drone.It was left to Philip Glass to show that minimalism can have a heart, in three characteristically mournful movements of his Metamorphosis. Throughout the evening’s bland fare, Jeanrenaud, beautifully lit, remained icily cool and disengaged. The use of music was a pity, contributing to the sneaking suspicion that she has not quite thrown off the mantle of quartet cellist after all.Annette Morreau Reopening Weekend, Brighton Dome, BrightonBuilt in 1805 as stables for the Prince Regent’s horses, the Brighton Dome was upgraded for human use in the 1860s, when its huge Regency rotunda was first used as an assembly room, before being converted into a concert hall in 1935. Closed for renovation in 1999, it has just reopened, three years and £22m later and only six months behind schedule.The main new foyer and bar area (where the library once was) is obviously unfinished, but as for the auditorium itself, it was still full, on Saturday night, of people in hard hats, busily putting finishing touches to the interior decor Or so it seemed.

Was it the instrument itself or its position? A pity the LPO didn’t repeat the Mozart piano concerto it had played before the Messiaen in London a few days earlier: it would have offered some comparison.Mark Pappenheim. The last Frenchman to bring his Disneyland experience to Britain helped to save the Millennium Dome from total failure. Now Sadler’s Wells, Britain’s premier dance venue, has appointed a new chief executive who was also trained at the theme park. As managing director of the Paris Opera Ballet and School, he worked with Rudolf Nureyev and choreographers including Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp.But his experience with Disney will have helped woo the board of the prestigious venue in Islington, north London. Mr Choplin, 52, was vice-president of entertainment for Disneyland Paris, where he adapted the American Disney experience for Europeans before moving to Walt Disney in Los Angeles in charge of creative development.The American press saw him as more Medici than Mickey Mouse in a job promoting high-brow arts projects, such as new symphonies, for the celebration of the millennium.After heading a staff of more than 1,800 in Paris, Sadler’s Wells may prove a shock. Even including freelancers, Mr Choplin will have just 200 staff and a budget of £10m. But he will at least have a refurbished building and funding – at £1.5m – that is 15 times what it was when Mr Albery joined eight years ago..

Wayne McGregor is a better choreographer than you might imagine from some of the pretentious twaddle printed about him (in which he has himself not been entirely innocent). What he does best is to set dancers moving in a distinctive manner, often with a great deal of speed and vigour. He goes in for a lot of sharply angled shapes, and that is true of his leisurely moments and static poses as well as the more active elements.Where he is often less satisfying, it seems to me, is in his addiction to gimmicks and hi-tech tricks. Behind them, photos of empty rooms are projected intermittently. Later, we are to have these dancers are grouped in a carpeted space.However, at about the midway point they go off and change into armour-like black gear, with which they wear metallic prostheses that resemble claws but are used more like swords with a joint in the middle. Animatronics, they are apparently called, and they come courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop, of Muppets fame. For this section, the projections are turned into abstractions, while the action becomes more specific, with attacks and duels.Thereafter McGregor himself, tall and smiley in white, his shaved pate gleaming, concludes the piece with a smooth-moving solo, while the back curtain shows patterns shaped like a sinuous worm of metal, which for the very end turns into a little man with fluttery wings.

Ravi Deepres is the digital video designer, but the most significant of the collaborators seems to me to be Scanner, responsible for the score, which, with the strong rhythms of its various noises, did more than anything else to pull the disparate parts together.Nemesis is never boring, but it scarcely adds up to the sum of its parts. “Extraterrestrial dance meets reality TV,” said the publicity. “Sharp but earthy dance coincides with still pictures, videos and dangerous appliances” might be more accurate Interesting, yes; satisfying, no.Touring until 17 May. A few years ago, there was nearly a diplomatic incident over the reaction of critics here to the Norwegian musical Which Witch. I’m afraid I contributed to the fracas not just by my uniformly adverse review, but by telling a reporter from the Today programme that it was while watching the show that I began to understand why Ibsen had chosen to spend so much of his life in Italy.I trotted out that anecdote to Katie Mitchell just before the curtain went up on the first night of her current production of Nightsongs, by the contemporary Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse (no relation, unfortunately, of Bob). I said that I hoped that the new piece would help me to rebuild bridges with that wonderful nation.
Well, you can’t win them all, can you? I regret to say that what Nightsongs helps me to understand is why Norwegians pronounce “Jon” as “Yawn”.