July 5, 2011

Review: Jazzy Distortions (Wayne McGregor in Paris)

Laura @ 14:46 —
Filed under: English,Reviews/critiques — Tags: , , , , , , , , , —

L’anatomie de la sensation
Choreography: Wayne McGregor
Paris Opera Ballet
Opéra Bastille, Paris
July 2, 2011

Don’t be put off by the pompous title or the strike currently playing havoc with Paris Opera performances: Wayne McGregor’s first evening-length creation for a ballet company, L’anatomie de la sensation, is a welcome surprise at the end of a rather pedestrian season. After a glacial first collaboration with the POB in 2007, Genus, this work for eleven soloists and a corps de ballet has uneven moments but brims with a more relaxed inventiveness.

Billed as a tribute to Francis Bacon, the piece intermittently references the painter, with silent screams among the corps de ballet and bursts of violence in one pas de deux. McGregor’s work, however, is too idiosyncratic to take the connection much further, and relies on his customary bright, minimalist sets and costumes for visual effect. Instead, the driving force in L’anatomie is the score, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s own homage to Bacon, Blood on the Floor. Its jazzy accents bring out a new playfulness in McGregor’s customary menu of fast, quirky, hyper-articulated twists and turns, and this light touch works particularly well in the eighth movement, “Crackdown”, where Alice Renavand’s zippy pointe work and seeming improvisations with Josua Hoffalt light up the stage. (…)

» Read the full review in the Financial Times

Jérémie Bélingard & Matthias Heymann in Lanatomie de la sensation © Anne Deniau

Jérémie Bélingard & Matthias Heymann in L'anatomie de la sensation © Anne Deniau





January 22, 2011

Review: A cathartic Rite at the Paris Opera Ballet

Laura @ 15:07 —
Filed under: English,Reviews/critiques — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , —

Apollo / O zlozony/O composite / The Rite of Spring
Choreography: George Balanchine, Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier
December 17, 2010

Would any other ballet company dare to present Nureyev’s Swan Lake and Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring at the same time, in two different opera houses? The Paris Opéra Ballet prides itself on the extremes it covers in terms of repertoire, but their Christmas contemporary mixed bill was a hit-and-miss flirt with foreign styles.

Apollo has been seen more often than any other Balanchine ballet in Paris in recent years, most likely because of the limited number of dancers required. The company’s placid classicism and cool demeanor make for polished performances, but sadly evacuate what in the choreography is space for subversiveness—the muses in particular are so polite that Balanchine’s metaphorical ballet looks at times uncannily like a misogynistic ode to a man arranging his obedient harem. (…)

» Read the full review in Dance Magazine





April 1, 2010

Interview : Maverick Marie-Agnès Gillot in Pointe Magazine (April/May 2010)

Laura @ 21:46 —
Filed under: English,Interviews — Tags: , , —

Marie-Agnès Gillot was the first dancer in the history of the Paris Opera Ballet to be made an Etoile not at the end of traditional full-length ballet, but after a contemporary performance. It was Carolyn Carlson’s Signes, in 2004, and since then Gillot has remained the most peculiar star of the company – with few classical heroines in her repertoire, but instead a wealth of tailor-made creations and avant-garde collaborations. I caught up with her a few months ago for a Reverence interview published in the latest issue of Pointe Magazine, with the lovely Maria Kochetkova on the cover:

Cover of the April/May 2010 issue © Pointe Magazine

Cover of the April/May 2010 issue © Pointe Magazine

You are a choreographer as well as a dancer. What drew you to hip hop for Les Rares Différences, the piece you made for the 2007 Festival of Dance in Suresnes?
My subject was Auguste Rodin. I needed bodies like sculptures—ballet dancers are too lean. Hip hop dancers have an absolutely statuesque upper body. I learned a lot from hip hop, too, especially from the movement dissociations.

What are you currently working on?
I’m putting together the first dance flash mob in France, for a charity. We will have professional dancers performing in a train station.

Who inspires you?
All of my colleagues. I pay a lot of attention to them, and I always find something that I would like to replicate. I love taking a little something from everyone.

Of which accomplishment are you the most proud?
I loved my first Don Quixotes and Swan Lakes. It was a consecration—I was already an étoile, even though I didn’t have the title. The audience and the orchestra were stamping. My dressing room was so filled with flowers I couldn’t sit. (…)

» Read the full interview in Pointe Magazine: ‘The Maverick Star,’ April/May 2010





December 24, 2009

Review: Chasing the character of the Ballets Russes

Laura @ 10:01 —
Filed under: English,Reviews/critiques — Tags: , , , , , , , —

Ballets Russes
Le Spectre de la Rose / L’après-midi d’un faune / Le Tricorne / Petrouchka
Paris Opera Ballet
Opéra Garnier, Paris
18 December 2009

The centenary of the Ballets Russes has provided ballet companies with the opportunity to revive great works, many of them routinely achieving what eludes most creations today: an alchemy born not only of choreography, but also of music and design. The credits for the Paris Opera Ballet’s latest triple bill form a Who’s Who of ballet in the 1910s: Nijinsky, Fokine, Massine, Picasso, Bakst, Benois, Stravinsky, not to mention the dancers that once shared the stage with them. Where the works stand, however, today’s performers don’t always relate to the character flavor of the choreography, despite the glittering array of Principals on display for the filmed performances of the run.

Le Spectre de la Rose is an important work, perhaps the first manifestation of a woman’s desire in classical dance, but it is also the one piece on the program that seemed in serious need of a new design. The girl’s bonnet is now faded, old-fashioned in an intrusive way, while the Rose’s pale unitard and its pink petals only serve to make the feminine lines of today’s performers more obvious. Or is it just that we have lost something essential – the rich metaphor once conveyed by Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina? On the basis of this performance, it is quite likely. Matthias Heymann turns the Rose into a jumping exercise – his eyes tend to go dead, and while he has clearly worked on his ports de bras, a certain stiffness remains. His partnering is also remarkably pedestrian – when the girl reaches out for him, he is happy to catch his breath for a minute behind her. His Rose is devoid of any perfume, but then – why throw him into a filmed performance so young, when comparisons will be made? Isabelle Ciaravola, now 37, but made an Etoile the same night as Heymann, gives a sensitive performance. Delicate and shy when she enters, she looks stunningly young as the young girl dreaming about her rose. There’s a hint of French 19th-century romanticism about her, and although she works her unnaturally arched feet to the point of distortion, her sense of wonder brings some meaning to a pale Spectre. (…)

» Read the full review in Ballet.co Magazine

Benjamin Pech in Petrouchka © Sébastien Mathé / Opéra National de Paris

Benjamin Pech in Petrouchka © Sébastien Mathé / Opéra National de Paris





November 20, 2009

Review: In Jewels’ Paris store (Ashley Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia at the Palais Garnier)

Laura @ 01:59 —
Filed under: English,Reviews/critiques — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , —

Jewels
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier, Paris
5 & 12 November 2009

The Paris Opera Ballet clearly loves Jewels. Since its French premiere, in 2000, the company has danced it nearly 90 times – easier to tour than a narrative full-length, but still evocative of the supposed grandeur of the institution, Balanchine’s triptych has been shown in Australia and a good number of French cities. In the meantime, portions of the ballet, dressed by Christian Lacroix, have also started to look like a VIP party – smart, scintillating, and about as poetic as the jewellery section of the nearby Galeries Lafayette, despite Ashley Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia’s welcome visit.

As it is, Emeralds may be quintessentially French, but it is not sophisticated Lacroix French, despite the rather fitting creations of the designer. A good many dancers seem confused about the atmosphere they’re supposed to impersonate – some go for the big smile, some for expressionless, but an uneasiness persists over the potential lyricism of this intimate jewel. Strangely, those mixed feelings still work well in the Molto Adagio that closes the ballet. At this point, the seven soloists seemed to me a new image of a decadent nobility hanging on to its delicacy of manners, the men absent princes, the women already in another world – as if the chain they form and re-form was already dead, buried by too many changes. (Whether that bodes well for the company is another matter.)

Clairemarie Osta was head and shoulders above everyone else in this fleeting ballet, which fits her like a glove. In the Sicilienne solo, she is entirely lost in her world – an underwater kingdom where playing and mourning are two sides of the same thing. Her curtseys are little surprises, invitations to the invisible, but the Ondine she impersonates so well has clearly discovered the weight of the years gone by. Later on, in the pas de deux, nostalgia wins – a nostalgia triggered by the absent presence of her partner (Benjamin Pech, at his most pallid). Her expressiveness and longing find no echo in him, and she seems again to be waiting for something that no longer exists – gazing into an empty path while walking delicately on pointe, her solitude magnificent.

» Full review on Ballet.co (Ashley Bouder, Gonzalo Garcia, Aurélie Dupont in Rubies, Marie-Agnès Gillot in Diamonds…)





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