Numbers Game
Almost mirroring the geopolitical situation, contemporary dance in the West—already in the USA and soon in Europe—is showing signs of wear and tear, if not decline.
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World-class review of ballet and dance.
Like most new adaptations of existing story ballet classics, the world premiere of artistic director James Sofranko’s “Swan Lake” for Grand Rapids Ballet retained the bones of the original it was based on. Sofranko’s redux stayed faithful to the storyline of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s 1895 production, based on Russian and German folk tales, which told of Prince Siegfried, who fell in love with Princess Odette, a woman cursed to be a swan by day and to take human form only at night. It also retained a good measure of their original choreography. Into that, Sofranko seamlessly created and integrated his own choreography for portions of acts one, three, and four of the four-act production, which ran a tidy two hours.
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Almost mirroring the geopolitical situation, contemporary dance in the West—already in the USA and soon in Europe—is showing signs of wear and tear, if not decline.
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