Glimpsing Nureyev
Nureyev and Friends, a recent tribute event at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, opened with an introduction from Charles Jude, the longtime protégé of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Continue ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
Light and dark, day and night, youth and maturity, a flirtation and redemption, naturalistic and ethereal: “Giselle” spins a conjuror’s trick all the wilier for its very familiarity, its everlasting allurement. An autumnal village presented in Act I flips to reveal the ballet blanc of Act II: two halves of a whole. We know this, we anticipate this, we lap it up. Fermented in honey before interval, raising a flagon of mead to love, and even love’s folly, and unpinned madness, we heed the warnings spun to the villagers. The flipside to a light-hearted Peasant pas de deux is heartache and mourning. We are cognisant of the fact that when we return to our seats in the theatre, the scene will have changed. Light for dark. Day for night. Of the earth for beyond this realm. A village for the darkest forest floor of folkloric apparitions who demand you dance to your death. Raise your flagon of mead for raise your ghostly spirits, cloaked in a shawl spun by otherworldly spiders.
Ako Kondo and Ty King-Wall in the Australian Ballet's “Giselle.” Photograph by Jeff Busby
“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”
Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.
Already a paid subscriber? Login
Nureyev and Friends, a recent tribute event at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, opened with an introduction from Charles Jude, the longtime protégé of Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Continue ReadingListening to John Cage’s “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” is a wonderfully contradictory experience. The composer disrupts our auditory expectations by placing an assortment of small objects such as erasers, screws, and bolts, among the piano strings. A musician plays the piano in the typical manner, but instead of a harmonic tone, we hear more percussive sounds of kettle drums, timpani, xylophone, tin cans, even bells. One can imagine how an artist like Lucinda Childs, who was part of the Judson Dance Theater radicals in the ‘60s, might be attracted to such a composition. The choreographer is perhaps best known...
Continue ReadingIt is always exciting when the New York City Ballet kicks off a season with an all-Balanchine program. However, the Spring Season’s opening quartet of Balanchine ballets—all strong in their own right—didn’t hang together as well as some other combos.
Continue ReadingMoreso than many Balanchine offshoot companies, the Dance Theater of Harlem—founded by the New York City Ballet principal dancer Arthur Mitchell in 1969—keeps the Balanchine ethos at the forefront of its programming.
Continue Reading
comments