"It’s like a game of tennis – I hit the ball and she returns it.". Margaret Willis catches up with choreographer Patrick de Bana to talk about his choroegraphic life and latest project - contributing to Svetlana Zakharova's show Amore - which tours to the UK in November.
Tag - National Ballet of China
★★★✰✰ Peony Pavilion has become a signature work for the National Ballet of China and it’s easy to see why it has come back.
Gallery by Dave Morgan...
The National Ballet of China dancers are beautifully trained, surprisingly tall, willowy – even the men – and delicately featured.
This time, I made 15 trips to the theatres – there were performances at 5pm and 9pm each day - and saw 82 different full-length ballets or extracts in the eight days I was in Havana.
"It is performed with great commitment..." says Lynette Halewood of a Jayne Eyre ruthlessly pruned for dance...
Ideological qualms aside, White Haired Girl is an odd bird. The choreography is a hybrid between textbook classical vocabulary and Chinese opera, an idea interesting in itself but here executed with a lack of imagination...
It was a program that harkened back to the big international Galas of previous years, as well as a nice reference to the company’s first years, when artists including Sonia Arova, Erik Bruhn, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev guest-starred.
The ballerinas who made the greatest impact were Uliana Lopatkina and Tamara Rojo: regal, gracious, seemingly effortless...