3 replies to this topic

[dirac]

An interview with Andrew Wright of the Australian Ballet.

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"[Dance lessons] opened my eyes to everything - I learnt jazz, tap and ballet. When I was in primary school I wanted to be an accountant because I wanted to carry a briefcase and work in a high-rise. That died a long time ago."

Wright went from local dance lessons to be named winner of the Anne Woolliams Award for Excellence in Dance in 2001 and becoming a Telstra Ballet Dancer Award nominee in 2008, as well as travelling the world.

[dirac]

A review of "Rock the Ballet" at the Edinburgh Festival by Kelly Apter in The Scotsman.

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But it was during the Michael Jackson numbers that I realised why Rock The Ballet wasn't rocking my world - the choreography looks and feels like material for backing dancers, but without a star singing front and centre, it has to stand alone. Asking performers of this quality to dance such low-brow material is like using Chinese silk to fashion a kiss-me-quick hat.

[dirac]

The National Ballet of China performs at the Edinburgh Festival.

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"It still feels like we're beginning," says Madame Zhao Ruheng, a small, softly spoken woman who has been a member of the NBC since its formation. We meet far away in the brand-new National Centre for the Performing Arts in central Beijing, an astonishing piece of architecture that looks like a giant egg floating on water. It's taken many days of negotiations to get an audience with this formidable woman, who started out as a principal dancer in the NBC, danced on pointe in fields of frozen mud during the Cultural Revolution, invited the likes of Nureyev and Fonteyn as company guests, and became artistic director in 1994. She is sweetly maternal - not the expected diva - fussing over me, buying me yoghurt and green tea, and telling her extraordinary story in a mixture of English and (translated) Mandarin with warmth and honesty. Even in slacks and a sweater, her hair short, she looks like a dancer.....

[dirac]

A review of the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet by Clement Crisp in The Financial Times.

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Impeccable dancing. Heart-lifting dancing. As the week ended, the Mariinsky Ballet staged a triple bill of works by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and made them sublimely their own. Over the past two decades, the company has reclaimed its Old Boy, Balanchine, whose Scotch Symphony and Ballet Imperial were on view, together with Jerome Robbins’s In The Night. St Petersburg schooling illuminated and enhanced these ballets, superlative classic style burnishing and naturalising choreography made for very different ensembles.