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...
Tag - La Sylphide
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.
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...
We catch up with Septime Webre, choreographer and artistic director of Washington Ballet. So what makes him get up in the morning? Oksana Khadarina finds out...
‘I was not interested in the image of womanhood as it is presented by the media, nor in its visual aspect,’ says Vagnerová...
The Festival kicked off with two classical ballet companies presenting very different versions of the oldest and most celebrated Romantic ballets in the repertoire: a classic rendering of Giselle and a radically different take on La Sylphide...
At Monday’s National Dance Awards two de Valois awards were given for outstanding achievement in dance. Here are Graham Watts citations for Leanne Benjamin and Matthew Bourne, as given on the day.
Someone wise once said that the journey is as important as the destination...
ABT's run of Les Sylphides this season are different - after research, the company, under their musical director Ormsby Wilkins, have rediscovered a 1941 orchestration by Benjamin Britten. Marina Harss reveals all in conversation with Wilkins...
Juliet Burnett (a Senior Artist with Australian Ballet) is in unchartered territory – injured and offstage for the first time in over 10 years. We are following her rehab – Part 3: "Now pain-free..."
Juliet Burnett (a Senior Artist with Australian Ballet) is in unchartered territory – injured and offstage for the first time in over 10 years. We are following her rehab - Part 2: "Stress reaction, not stress fracture"
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...
Juliet Burnett (a Senior Artist with Australian Ballet) is in unchartered territory - injured and offstage for the first time in over 10 years. We are following her rehab: a fascinating insight into the private reality of dancers' lives...
Quibbling and Côté aside, these were both terrific performances, bursting with energy ...I wouldn’t mind seeing the Canadians become regular visitors to Saratoga
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...
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.
But stuck in the middle of all this brightness was Ivesiana, like a ghost at a birthday party. It is a most unsettling ballet.