Quite by accident I ended up seeing LINES Ballet’s fall season twice. A good thing I did, too.
Tag - Bach
It’s good to see the company perform Sylphides again after a hiatus of eight years. The style hasn’t eroded. ...The dancers believe in it.
Because of the ephemeral nature of choreography, it’s unusual for a ballet that has lain dormant for decades to return to life. But this fall, it will...
'Necessity, Again' ends the programme on a high. Kylian’s 'Indigo Rose' is an effective opener, provided you don’t find yourself asking why he made the choices he did.
Dance Odysseys at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival with reviews on 20 dance works by Scottish Ballet, Scottish Dance Theatre, Gelabert Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa, James Cousins and Rosie Kay. Also thoughts on 4 rare films and links to much video material and many other reviews. It's big!
Each revisiting seems to offer up more than the sum of its parts, giving these former works a new and exciting lease of life
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...
Though this year it was Nijinsky’s turn to be reclaimed as a Russian icon, the contents of the gala had little to do with him. Very probably the choice of items – mainly pas de deux - depended on which dancers were available to perform whatever was in their repertoire.
Beloved Renegade - I’d venture to say that this is one of Taylor’s great works, heartfelt, profound, complex and deeply musical.
Opening night was a gala performance; one might have expected Esplanade, or Arden Court, but that’s just not Taylor’s style. For a choreographer who has been criticized for being too popular in his tastes, Taylor can be very odd indeed.
...I’m not certain in which direction the company is headed. There is so much potential to be realised that it would be disappointing to see it ebb away.
It is refreshing to see Jiri Kylian’s repertoire performed by a mostly modern company, and the two works of his that completed the programme were danced with an encouraging sense of theatrical flair.
For the twenty years his company has been around, Wells's choreography has incorporated contact-improvisation, sports paraphernalia (balls of every size from ping pong to basketball, boxing gloves, skateboards), music from classical to rock, often in rapid succession, juggling and gymnastics.
In 1984 Fosythe's vocabulary was much more strongly rooted in ballet: though it is spikily aggressive and legs are flung upwards over beyond the perpendicular, it is not as twisted and distorted as it later became. It is cool, rigorous, fiercely disciplined and blazing with adrenalin.
But in Sharper, aggressively awkward movements are kept to a minimum: the ugly is reduced, and the residue now acts like a tonic of wit. And for the first time in Elo’s work, at least in my experience, we find a lyricism and beauty so profound they sometimes took my breath away.
This was a pleasant night, pleasant for its broad content but especially pleasant because mixed bills and choreographic variety are not something normally associated with Northern Ballet. It's a time of great hardship for all the major companies as grants are pegged back and I hope the company will continue its journey in introducing more variety like this.