A late link, but I was in Monaco in early July for the last part of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo’s season-long homage to the Ballets Russes – and my review of Maillot’s Schéhérazade and Shen Wei’s 7 to 8 and, a world premiere, appeared in the Financial Times on July 14.
Schéhérazade / 7 to 8 and
Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo
Salle Garnier
8 July 2010
With the centenary of the Ballets Russes, Monte-Carlo has an excuse to celebrate its own illustrious dance heritage. Diaghilev’s ensemble found a home in the city in the 1910s and 1920s; after it disbanded, other impresarios took over and set up a new Russian troupe in Monte-Carlo, which performed under various guises until 1963. The company was reborn in 1985 as Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and director and choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot has since shaped it into a sleek, innovative neo-classical ensemble.
Its summer season is a clever mix of re-creations of Ballets Russes works and world premieres. The Schéhérazade Fokine created in 1910, for instance, was a landmark event for the young company, but Ida Rubinstein and Nijinsky’s startling eroticism, as the Sultan’s favourite Zobeide and the Golden Slave, has too often given way to Orientalist cliché in subsequent renditions. Maillot has gone back to the ballet’s roots, Rimsky-Korsakov’s sumptuous 1888 score, to choreograph a new version. The music’s sheer texture is hard to equal, but Maillot’s musicality sets his attempt apart. He adds nuances where they had disappeared over time, and his patterns and tableaux for the ensemble are endlessly inventive. (…)
» Read the full review in the Financial Times
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La petite danseuse de Degas
Choreography: Patrice Bart
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier
29 June 2010
“The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” is one of the Musée d’Orsay’s best-known pieces. Perhaps even more than his numerous paintings of dancers, Degas’ small bronze statue with its inscrutable expression captures the ambivalence of a young ballerina’s dreams in the 19th century. The discovery of the model’s identity in the 1990s prompted the idea of a ballet based on her life: a romantic young girl studying at the Paris Opera Ballet School is pushed by her mother to seduce the “regulars” in a ballet world where sex is the route to preferment. And who better than the Paris Opera Ballet itself to dance the story of her demise?
The idea may have been excellent, but the resulting production, premiered in 2003, is almost fatally flawed. The score that Denis Levaillant was commissioned to compose is not dance-friendly – obscure and at times dissonant, it fails to evoke the lively atmosphere of 19th-century Paris, not helped either by the set’s drab backcloths. The costumes, from the reproduction of the Little Dancer’s tutu to an eccentric take on bustle gowns in the second act, are charmingly sophisticated, a trademark of the Paris Opera, but the world Patrice Bart translates to the stage emerges with little resonance, historical or otherwise. (…)
» Read the full review in the Financial Times
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A late post, but Kylián’s Kaguyahime is on at the Opéra Bastille until July 15!
Kaguyahime
Choreography: Jirí Kylián
Paris Opera Ballet
Opéra Bastille
21 June 2010
Western dance has been exploring the far east this spring at the Paris Opera Ballet. The season has brought a revival of the exotic La Bayadère, Siddharta, a new work based on the life of the Buddha, and now the company premiere of Jirí Kylián’s Kaguyahime. Based on the 10th-century Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the oldest surviving narrative in Japanese literature, this 1988 work impressively intertwines two theatrical traditions.
It tells the story of Kaguyahime, a moon princess who descends to earth and whose beauty provokes war and chaos among men before she returns to the sky. Kylián’s contemporary staging is respectful of the tale’s enigmatic symbolism. Kaguyahime, in a glittering white unitard, is a remote presence. The men’s earthy dances evoke a latter-day Bayadère divertissement, while the broken lines and open palms, inspired by many-armed Hindu gods, insist on the message of peace the princess brings with her. (…)
» Read the full review in the Financial Times
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My review of this excellent evening of dance for the Financial Times -
Rambert Dance Company
The Art of Touch / RainForest / A Linha Curva
Siobhan Davies / Merce Cunningham / Itzik Galili
Sadler’s Wells, London
25 May 2010
“Triple bill” so often equals “mixed bag” that a beautifully composed one is cause for celebration. With a Siobhan Davies delicacy, vintage Merce Cunningham and a resounding finale, the sum of the three works that Rambert Dance is performing this week at Sadler’s Wells is a gratifyingly varied evening.
The Art of Touch, which Davies created in 1995, is all elegant musicality. Rambert’s dancers follow the anxious ebb and flow of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas as if chasing time, bringing out the unaffected poetry of the work’s duets and patterns. Davies makes expressive use of the hands, hinting at fleeting narratives: one of the women seems repeatedly to let go of her secrets as she opens her palm; others knock at imaginary doors, seeming to initiate or terminate the score’s implacable cascades of notes. (…)
» Read the full review on FT.com
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