People, Places, and Things
Bill T. Jones wriggles upstage on his back in a rectangle of light, reciting an unsent letter to the New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
On a bright spring afternoon, as Paris basked in long-awaited sunlight and the city frantically moved in the heat, the Opéra Garnier opened a portal to another world—a realm of eternal forms, ethereal beauty, and blue distances: those trembling horizons where the sea dissolves into sky, and the eye reaches toward the infinite. The Paris Opera Ballet School unveiled a triptych of choreographic visions, each an inquiry into the ideal—a glimpse into a distant, immaterial dimension: essential, incorporeal, and immune to time. In this spirit, the afternoon’s programme unfolded: beginning with Antony Tudor’s “Continuo” (1971), an Anglo-American neoclassical gem; flowing into the effervescent brilliance of August Bournonville, with excerpts from “Flower Festival in Genzano” (1858) and “Napoli” (1842); and culminating in the archetypal Greece of Maurice Béjart’s “Seven Greek Dances” (1983). Challenged by formidable technical and interpretative demands, the young dancers responded with lucid precision, musical elegance, and a refined expressivity. These are the hallmarks of the School—a three-hundred-year legacy nurtured with continued care and vision by the former étoile Élisabeth Platel. Only days earlier, at the première of the Spectacle de l’École de Danse on 24th April, she had been awarded the insignia of Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mérite by Brigitte Lefèvre—a richly deserved honour on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of her directorship.
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Bill T. Jones wriggles upstage on his back in a rectangle of light, reciting an unsent letter to the New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson.
PlusThe annual Dancing the Gods Festival of Indian Dance celebrated its fourteenth and final year with a generous finale May 16-18. This final event extended for three evenings instead of the usual two.
PlusSomething old, something new, something borrowed, and something “Blue.” The premise of Australasian Dance Collective’s fortieth anniversary celebration stems from the traditional divisions of time.
PlusShadows, dark matter and the enigmas of consciousness—the ideas behind Crystal Pite’s “Frontier” are timely and timeless at once.
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