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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Like Baz Luhrmann before him, Matthew Bourne’s contemporary reworking of “Romeo and Juliet” adds a coat of grit to fair Verona. Gone are the marbled columns and wrought-iron balconies of the Capulet court; it’s all sheetrock and cold metal bars at the Verona Institute, a juvie-asylum hybrid where disaffected teens are doped into submission. Absent too are the feuding families. Romeo’s parents are shellacked politicians, eager to hand their son over for medicated safekeeping, while Juliet’s are absent from the picture altogether. A legion of tyrannical guards stand in the way of our star-crossed lovers, commanded by a nightmarish Tybalt whose predation of Juliet escalates into rape just minutes into the show.
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Seren Williams and Andrew Monaghan in Matthew Bourne's “Romeo and Juliet.” 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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