★★★✰✰ The annual Ballet Icons gala, now in its 14th year, aims to promote Russian culture while providing a Sunday evening's entertainment for Russians in London and ballet-lovers...
Tag - Polina Semionova
★★★★✰ In the last several years, the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has developed a sideline to his main choreographic efforts: the reviving of ballets by Marius Petipa in a way that represents the original choreography with as much fidelity as possible...
★★★✰✰ 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.
After a successful season of Patrick de Bana’s Jane Eyre, back in 2013, Shanghai Ballet returns to the London Coliseum with the same choreographer’s Echoes of Eternity - we catch up with the stars of it - Wu Husheng and Qi Bingxue.
★★★✰✰ 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...
The American Ballet Theatre season continues with Giselle where Marina Harss saw Stella Abrera's company debut. The response to the performance was understandably enthusiastic.
Few nineteenth-century story ballets are as satisfying as Giselle, with its simple and poetic plot, compact structure and starkly contrasting moods. This week I watched four Giselles, with four distinctly different casts...
On Sunday, American Ballet Theatre’s two-week fall season draws to a close. By most measures, it’s been a success...
Throughout the Bach Partita, Tharp’s movement is technical, precise, and highly articulated. As with Balanchine, the bodies are always distinct, framed in space.
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...
Like a Fabergé egg with a tiny golden bird inside, Sylvia is decadent, a bit indulgent, but delightful.
The previous night had been dominated by Gillian Murphy’s performance. She is an absolute powerhouse in this role, a kind of super-stylized, inhuman creature, an art-deco distillation of speed and daring.
American Ballet Theatre are dancing Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Marina Harss reviews 2 casts: Polina Semionova / David Hallberg and Roberto Bolle / Hee Seo...
I have to say that after seeing the Shostakovich Trilogy twice, and picking up many more details ...I found it very compelling indeed, especially the opening and closing ballets.
Has there ever been a more sensitive, sympathetic chronicler of that inner flutter brought on by the onset of love than Frederick Ashton? It seems unlikely, on the evidence of ABT's premiere of A Month in the Country...
Symphony in C, a luminous outpouring of legs and arms, crisp geometries, bobbing rhythms, and articulate patter-like conversations for the feet, is a vivid reminder of why one goes to the ballet at all. Luminosity and classical logic, laced with wit and intelligence.
The season began with a high-energy mixed bill which showed the company on sparkling form.
His choreography is busy, occasionally predictable, but more often inventive, strong on musicality and both remarkably fluid and emotionally charged; stretching the dancers both literally and in terms of their artistic diversity.
...the Mikhailovsky put on a wonderful display of classical excellence that we just don't routinely see in the UK.