Jann Parry on the award winning Peter Schaufuss "La Sylphide", not seen in the UK in decades, and Li Cunxin's Queensland Ballet who are bringing it to London this summer. Includes an interview with Cunxin...
Tag - August Bournonville
The programme stretches and shows off the young graduates to good advantage in a well-chosen assortment.
In her début as the Sylph, Lovette was warm, soft, enticing, more child-like than enigmatic.
Johan Kobborg took over as Director of Bucharest National Ballet just over a year ago. Time for Graham Watts to go and see how they are looking - in two very different bills...
At first glance, it’s hard to think of two choreographers more unalike than August Bournonville and Balanchine...
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...
Royal Ballet Don Quixote London, Royal Opera House 25 November 2014 Gallery of pictures by Dave Morgan www.roh.org.uk New directors of old ballets are often tempted to make them relevant to today by stripping away dated conventions and substituting new ones: earthy peasants, drunken party-goers, crazed hallucinations in place of visions. Carlos Acosta has not gone too far in his 2013 version of...
Having wowed London with three acclaimed seasons over the last six years, at last the Mikhailovsky Ballet make their American debut in NY. Lisa Snyder introduces the company and its repertoire...
The evening ended with Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, one of the most wildly original, hilarious dances I’ve ever seen. If the Keystone Cops had taken up ballet, this is what they’d have looked like.
Graham Watts was at the Palais Des Congres for us to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Rudolf Nureyev's birth...
Graham Watts braved 21 hours of flights and missed connections just to spend a night at the Yekaterinburg Opera House followed by a meeting with its new(ish) Director of Ballet, Slava Samodurov, a former Principal at The Royal Ballet...
He dances with his whole body, his head, his feet, his back, his chest, even the tips of his fingers. His movements are full of detail and texture and sensuality, peppered with sudden changes of tempo and force..
Rojo has declared that her ambition as artistic director of ENB is to make audiences hold their breath. I certainly did during Le Jeune Homme et la Mort...
Gudrun Bojesen, the Royal Danish Ballet's leading classical ballerina, is at an interesting stage of her career...
My nickname in BRB used to be Bastard - and something happened with Ballet Hoo! - I don't know whether it's my age, or the kids we worked with, but it made me realise that you can get the best out of dancers and students by coming in on a certain level and talking to them on a certain level - not always shouting. I do shout still, I do get very angry...
The compere of the evening was Anthony Dowell, in fine voice. He spoke the narration, enacted several of the characters and gallantly danced the ‘Fred step’ from Pavlova’s 'Gavotte' with Ursula Hageli as Anna.