At first glance, it’s hard to think of two choreographers more unalike than August Bournonville and Balanchine...
Tag - The Dream
After the long famine, Ashton’s ballets made a welcome return this week with the company’s triple bill under the umbrella title, The Dream.
Who but Frederick Ashton could turn a marital spat into one of the most delightful, touching works in the ballet repertoire? His 1964 The Dream is precisely that...
To fully enjoy Ashton, one has to be willing to acquiesce to one’s own softer impulses, a sense of wonder and perhaps a little nostalgia, and to surrender the loveliness of small things.
In the Royal Ballet's last programme for this season two old favourites frame the first performances of Alastair Marriott's latest work, Connectome. It's a well-balanced evening and gives the new piece every chance to shine.
Gallery by Dave Morgan...
Both as a tribute to Ashton and as a coming-out party, it’s hard to imagine how the festival could have gone better. The ballets are in good hands.
One of Bintley’s other notable commitments as Director is the rapid development of young dancers. For a graduating dance student, hungry for big roles, BRB is the company to aim for....
Fashioning a ballet out of The Tempest is no small endeavor. How does one distill Shakespeare’s rather complex play into forty-six wordless minutes....
My father asked my original teacher in Rockville, Ms. Hood, whether it was viable for me to become a dancer, and she said she thought I could, even though I wasn’t blessed with beautiful legs and feet. But I had a lot of other assets...
Like a Fabergé egg with a tiny golden bird inside, Sylvia is decadent, a bit indulgent, but delightful.
Well, performing for me is really about that experience of giving to the audience. In the studio you work and perfect things, you collaborate with your partner, but for me it’s about what happens on the stage, the ability to give something, to your partner, to the audience.
The programme included works both old and new but it was not an altogether successful mixture. The dancers looked most at home, and at their most sleek and impressive, in Faster, a work made on them this year by their Artistic Director, David Bintley, evoking the striving of competitors in the Olympics.
Local audiences also saw the return of the Lyon Opera Ballet. Their mixed programme consisted of two ballets by Benjamin Millepied, a ballet by Maguy Marin, and best of all, Balanchine’s masterpiece, Concerto Barocco, staged by Nanette Glushak.
Take a test group of regular ‘Brits’ and show them a card with an apple computer emblem and, like a psychologist delving deep into their subconscious, ask them what comes to mind; Steve Jobs, iphone, ipad, creative, successful – they’d probably say. Now flash a card with ‘Ballet’ written on it.
30 pictures by Dave Morgan….
This is turning out to be a very good season for Kenneth MacMillan's Song of the Earth. We saw a deeply moving interpretation from Scottish Ballet at Sadler's Wells a couple of months ago, and last night, as the second half of a Royal Ballet double bill, it again looked like a masterpiece.