★★★★✰ The annual Icons gala provides the chance to see dancers who don't often appear in London...
Tag - Maria Alexandrova
The Bolshoi Ballet are in London this summer with Spartacus, Swan Lake, The Bright Stream and Don Quixote. One of the world's greatest companies, here are Jann Parry's thoughts on an important visit...
★★★✰✰ Williamson’s commission – the first of an ambitious Ballet Now programme for new works – was themed on issues of gender and alienation, with Brandon Lawrence being a man struggling for identity...
★★★✰✰ This year's Russian Ballet gala was ostensibly in honour of the 200th anniversary of Marius Petipa's birth. Any choreography attributed to him was mostly a long way 'after Petipa', but it's always fun to see excellent Russian dancers deliver pas de deux from Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Le Corsaire.
★★★★✰ The long gala (three and a half hours with one interval) was well organised, with no speeches and no protracted curtain calls.
★★★✰✰ Olga Smirnova danced the role of Aurora. Smirnova is a dancer with impressive physical gifts: beautiful proportions, a long elegant line, a supple back and expressive arms...
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★✰✰ Every gala needs a revelation, and this one was provided by Sergio Bernal, a Spanish dancer who dominated the stage in an imperious farruca solo from Antonio’s flamenco version of The Three Cornered Hat...
It is even more disappointing that the troupe should open its run with a Swan Lake so lackluster... It’s not the dancers’ fault. At every level, the Bolshoi dancers move with thrilling force and fullness.
There is a lack of egotism to Messerer’s work that is immensely appealing, too: unlike Nureyev or Grigorovitch, he never appears to be coercing the music or the steps into fitting his idiosyncratic vision.
Grigorovich’s staging of Act III is masterly. He has the fakirs lull Solor into an opium-induced sleep in a setting that lifts away to reveal a rocky arch. Within it Solor sees a vision of Nikiya enticing him into a ballet blanc nirvana
Maria Alexandrova/Ruslan Skvortsov and Svetlana Zakharova/Alexander Volchkov casts - 20 pictures
The Bolshoi Ballet are touring 'The Flames of Paris' to London this summer - but Natasha Rogai recently caught up with it in Moscow for us. So what shape is the company in?