★★★★✰ I had missed SFB’s London season at Sadler’s Wells in 2019, so was pleased to catch up with ballets brought together for this digital triple bill.
Tag - Unbound Festival
★★★★★ Program 02, with works by Dwight Rhoden, Myles Thatcher and Mark Morris, more than lived up to my expectations. There was drama, joy, whimsy. A great night at the ballet, viewed from home of course.
★★★✰✰ There were parts I adored and elements that didn’t resonate as much.
★★★★✰ San Francisco Ballet’s Program 2 was dubbed Classical Re(Vision) – a remembering of and reconnection with choreography in SFB’s existing repertory catalogue.
Trey McIntyre talks to Claudia Bauer about creating "The Big Hunger" for San Francisco Ballet - to some particularly devilish Prokofiev it explores the little and big hungers of life and is premiered this week, on 13 February 2020.
★★★★✰ Ballet companies across the globe are in a new age of commissioning ...but none can match the pioneering zeal of this, the oldest American ballet company.
★★★✰✰ Program 5, titled Lyric Voices, welcomed back Trey McIntyre’s Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem and Christopher Wheeldon’s Bound To and the new work came from Yuri Possokhov...
Marston has been working at Northern Ballet creating Victoria for the company (premiere this month) and we wanted to find out more, also catch up on other commissions and discuss just how she works creatively and manages to juggle it all so effortlessly…
★★★★✰ A triple bill joining George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15, the San Francisco Ballet premiere of Benjamin Millepied’s Appassionata and Justin Peck’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.
★★★✰✰ Whether walking through space, cycling through a gestural sequence or dancing a technically demanding phrase the dancers were a real joy to watch. The choreography on the other hand, was more of a mixed bag.
"I think you’ve just got to dare to go there. It’s hard, it’s scary, but creation is always kind of scary in one way or the other. So I think you’ve just gotta have guts and go for it anyway." Alexander Ekman.
"I don’t know if we can make the world a better place, but we can definitely have the audience think about it."
★★★★★ A hundred monkeys might eventually type out Hamlet, but only a herd of unicorns on Ecstasy could come anywhere near Arthur Pita’s Björk Ballet.
★★★★✰ Program C’s offerings spanned the choreographic spectrum, from pure movement to narrative threads to inventive theatricality. Every work on the bill impressed with its freshness and ingenuity.
★★★✰✰ Snowblind is a great narrative ballet – the source material is striking and Marston’s interpretation of it, equally so.
★★★★✰ If Helgi Tomasson was hoping that Unbound: A Festival of New Works would generate heated debate on the state of ballet today, his wish has already been fulfilled just one night into the massive festival...