A Parisian Dream
A participatory eagerness, a desire to be part of something sweet and beautiful, suffused the return of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to San Francisco Ballet on the cusp of spring.
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Tonight's gripping episode sees Matthew Bourne, with a restaging by Etta Murfitt, channeling all of the very best 1940's cinema classics, from Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, via Hitchcock, David Lean and American silent movie iconography; as well as the more knockabout elements of vaudeville and slapstick. This is no twee fairytale, but rather, a meshing of historical fact steeped in survival as much as lyrical romanticism. For context, the production is bookended by plummy, RP voiced Pathe newsreels showing the devastation of war.
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Andrew Monaghan and Ashley Shaw in “Matthew Bourne's Cinderella.” Photograph by Johan Persson
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A participatory eagerness, a desire to be part of something sweet and beautiful, suffused the return of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to San Francisco Ballet on the cusp of spring.
Continue ReadingEntering his 10th year as artistic director of Philadelphia Ballet, Ángel Corella put his artists through a ring of fire in their early spring concert at the Academy of Music.
Continue ReadingIn her 1951 autobiography Dance to the Piper, Agnes de Mille spends seven pages describing in colorful detail what it was like to be on the road with the Ballets Russes.
FREE ARTICLESix dancers enter from stage left and position themselves along the rear wall, their backs to the audience. Today, the light through a row of windows casts them in silhouette.
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