classical ballet
judith.flanders
If you want virtuosity, there’s only one place to be in London right now, and that’s watching the Mikhailovsky’s fine production of that demented old warhorse, Don Quixote, with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in the leads.Don Quixote is one of the 19th-century’s pastiche pleasures, half-pantomime, half-burlesque, all razzmatazz. Choreographed by a Russian (actually, over time, six Russians), set in a Spain that never was, with music by an Austro-Hungarian, the last thing the ballet is is coherent. Instead one tiny episode from the original Cervantes novel, the story of a barber and Read more ...
judith.flanders
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s junior company to its senior world-class sister, the Mariinsky.What drew them? Well, the company has an extraordinary Soviet heritage, playing host to some of the great names of 1930s experimental dance. It probably helps, too, that it is now funded by an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet's 2013-14 season will open with Carlos Acosta's much-anticipated production of the virtuoso comic 19th-century ballet Don Quixote, the first of a traditional classical-looking year with modest openings for new work. Prime among those will be a cheeringly ambitious full-length story-ballet by Christopher Wheeldon based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a plot whose themes of jealousy in marriage and the abandonment of a child promise to push the generally abstract choreographer into a new dimension.The company's talented young junior Liam Scarlett also develops his skills at Read more ...
judith.flanders
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.Monotones II, the second or “white” half, was created first, a gala piece which defies the usual fate of gala pieces. The starkness, the heroic simplicity and grace of this trio was immediately apparent, and Ashton Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Despite the horror of the acid attack on their director Sergei Filin last week, the Bolshoi Ballet has confirmed its programme for its three-week Royal Opera House season from 29 July to 17 August. Filin's name remains at the head of the page as artistic director, though it is not yet known whether he will be able to come.Marking the 50th anniversary of the Moscow company's first Covent Garden tour with the veteran promoter Victor Hochhauser, the season is as conventional as usual, with brief glimpses of two shows that will have ballet aficionados scrambling for tickets.One will be the triple Read more ...
judith.flanders
The worldwide success of John Cranko’s 1960s version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, in turn an adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-drama, might have taken even the choreographer by surprise. Tchaikovsky himself worried that “Pushkin’s exquisite texture will be vulgarized if it is transferred to the stage”, and added, “How delighted I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, Pharaohs, poisonings, all the conventional stuff.”No scenic effects? No excess? No melodrama? Well no, not quite. First, Cranko was not permitted by his opera house to use Tchaikovsky's opera, so instead had Kurt-Heinz Stolze Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet. She was also nothing less than the saviour of the most precious texts in all Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists in timewarps, frenzied cobras, underwater ballets, jaunty tunes, and phalanxes of delectable archeresses. The original ballet premiered exactly 150 years ago, and what you'll see is a recreation of the fantastical, surreal exotica of the kind of theatre provided at the dawn of classical ballet. It is a sight that had been thought lost until 12 years Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta.But this was not a historical survey of attitudes to male dancers and how Oliver Cromwell messed with British heads - that interesting possibility remains unrealised on TV. This was about the act of fleeing slavery to find freedom, from constricted motherland to liberated Western Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.The all-day event will field a large number of speakers from both the performance and treatment sides. Rojo last week declared after the announcement of her appointment, "I have never been thin and I want for myself and for others to have long Read more ...