3 replies to this topic

[Mme. Hermine]

Alastair Macaulay reviews the Paris Opera Ballet in Pina Bausch's Orpheus and Eurydice:

http://www.nytimes.c...era-ballet.html

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In her danced version of Gluck's opera, performed over the weekend by the Paris Opera Ballet as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Orpheus knows one art alone: grief. He shows no bravery in entering the realm of the dead, bears no lyre, demonstrates no wonder on beholding the Elysian Fields. You wonder why this Orpheus needs to be told not to look at Eurydice; he never looks at anyone anyway.

Leigh Witchel's review for The New York Post:

http://www.nypost.co...9E6I7aszP2r3LIJ

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Death be not proud, but Paris Opera Ballet should be — of its stunning production of Pina Bausch’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” the tale of the man who dared to rescue his bride from the underworld, only to lose her again when he looked back at her.

Review of the company by Carol Pardo for danceviewtimes.

http://www.danceview.../tricolore.html

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The Paris Opera Ballet opened its first New York season in sixteen years with a triple bill of works to French scores by Serge Lifar, Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart under the rubric “Masters of the 20th Century”. Lifar was the chief dancer, choreographer and director of the company for a quarter century between 1930 and 1958. Petit was a product of the POB school, a dancer with the company, and for about six months, its director. But he is best known in France as the one who got away, who bucked the establishment, formed his own companies, and thrived. Béjart’s career took place well away from the POB, but he is revered in France. This program announced more clearly than anything else could, “This is where we come from. This is who we are. This is what we believe in.” It also made for a well-balanced evening, opening with the plotless classical “Suite en Blanc” followed by “L’Arlésienne,” which blended plot and mood, and finishing with the spectacle of “Boléro”.

[Mme. Hermine]

A review of Post:Ballet by Allan Ulrich in The San Francisco Chronicle.

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Post:Ballet is modest (nine dancers performed on Friday); the company's members boast impressive resumes. They dance with enormous concentration and verve. They're all physically alluring, and Dekkers has few reservations about divesting them of most of their clothes. A younger audience probably won't balk at the fact that all the music is recorded; much of it is synthesized and the beat is ever prominent (this observer found it all a bit unvaried). To help newcomers along, Dekkers in the program book provides his own interpretations of his dances, with which we are free to disagree.

[Mme. Hermine]

The Telegraph has an obituary for John Percival:

http://www.telegraph...n-Percival.html

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When the young Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West, Percival befriended him and later became his first biographer , revealing the conditions in Soviet Russia from which Nureyev had emerged and illuminating for the public his artistic motivation.


As The Times’s chief dance critic for more than three decades, Percival also shaped opinion both in Britain and America, wielding considerable clout in the heated debates of the 1970s about performances of the Royal Ballet under its choreographer-director Kenneth MacMillan.

[Helene]

Thanks to a heads up from lovemydancers:

Troupe in midst of key transition

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The brief discussion about a new training technique was a break from the matter at hand: preparing for a key transition at BalletMet. In a few days, on July 13, Charles would leave the company after 11 years as artistic director to begin his new position as ballet master at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago three days later.

.....Filling his shoes temporarily will be Kudelka, recently named the company's artistic consultant. His job is to bridge the gap between Charles and a new artistic director, for whom a search has begun.