Giselle belongs to the team of ballets we could watch over and over again: short & sweet (2 acts), few character dances (as compared to Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake), an engaging Romantic story blended with wonderful vintage choreography. And it’s a real treat to be able to cherry pick so many great pairings in [...]
From the monthly archives:
May 2009
Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon is a modern classic, loved by the audience and regularly performed by every major ballet company in the world. The success of this piece is a testament to full-length narrative ballet’s capacity to survive in a prominently abstract dance age and to attract new audiences, because let’s face it, love stories are always [...]
In ballet there are eight positions of the body from which all the various steps are executed. All the different schools of ballet use them, with slight variations from one to another (and some methods incorporate more positions or variations, but we are not going to be picky, since our aim is just to get [...]
Now that we know what both the Royal Ballet’s and the Sadler’s Wells’ 2009/2010 dance seasons look like, it’s time to start penciling in dates, drawing cast plans, organizing bookings and, most importantly, cancelling any previous engagements. Because the autumn/winter dance season, after the starvation of summer months, supersedes anything else we may have had [...]
Just over a year ago I was sitting at the Alina Cojocaru gala at the QEH with my jaw wide open: there were four Basilios (Johan Kobborg, Marian Walter, Daniel Ulbricht and Sergei Polunin) plus 2 Kitris (Alina Cojocaru and Roberta Marquez) taking turns in the Don Quixote variations. Whilst the four men spun simultaneous [...]
The Balanchine method is not a syllabus for training per se, but the term is generally applied to describe the way of teaching dancers at the School of American Ballet (the school associated with the New York City Ballet), preparing them for the specific requirements of the Balanchine repertoire with its focus on very quick [...]
