I don’t really believe in lists, but it’s admittedly fun to look back over the year and reflect on moments that have stayed with me. So here they are, in no particular order…
Tag - Gudrun Bojesen
To watch Bournonville is to see visages of Marie Taglioni or Carlotta Grisi lifted straight from a lithograph, complete with the sloping shoulders, the torso tipping from the waist and the demure demeanor. As to the men, Bournonville gave them stuff to do,..
...we really are short-changed in not seeing these dancers more regularly.
Gallery by Dave Morgan...
This time, I made 15 trips to the theatres – there were performances at 5pm and 9pm each day - and saw 82 different full-length ballets or extracts in the eight days I was in Havana.
In fact delight was the keynote of the whole evening ...I was very happy to see the whole company reclaiming their 'joy in dancing', the Bournonville essence which is fundamentally what keeps these old ballets alive.
Gudrun Bojesen, the Royal Danish Ballet's leading classical ballerina, is at an interesting stage of her career...
So far as I know, no major company has ever before attempted a time-shifted Bayadère, so Hübbe had the whole of history to pick from. He chose the later years of the British Raj...
...cut down to a single act and shown as part of a properly-balanced double or triple bill it could work beautifully, rather than sending me home feeling hungry.
Several times during the evening I wondered how much anyone who happened never to have seen Lund before would have understood about him from this performance. They would have learnt about his peerless Bournonville technique, and about his ability to get under the skin of the character he's playing...
It's said that for financial reasons there will be no more performances of Lady of the Camellias here after this run – that would be a little tragedy of its own: these dancers deserve the chance to grow in their roles and their audience deserves the opportunity to see them do it. Let's hope some way will be found to make it happen.
One of the posters for the Royal Danish Ballet's Dans2Go programme, now in its second year, describes it as 'Ballet for Beginners': it's intended primarily as a taster evening to show new audiences what ballet can do, via three short pieces covering the widest possible range. All tickets cost 150 kroner – about £17 – or half that for under-25s or students, so it's not surprising that every...
What a nice find! A casual Google search, a few weeks ago, led me to a book I’d never heard of but which has turned out to be doubly interesting as well as, already, a source of a lot of pleasure.