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[Mme. Hermine]

A portrait of Mona Inglesby:

http://www.telegraph...ish-ballet.html

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A plaque has gone up inside the artists’ entrance at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Small in size, it’s a giant step for a campaign by a group of elderly dancers who have worked for years to right a great wrong – to honour the country’s largest ballet company of the wartime years and the invisible woman of British ballet.


In 1941, when she was 22, Mona Inglesby founded the International Ballet. For the next 13 years, through some of the worst austerity Britain has ever known, she ran it entirely on the basis of its box-office success. It’s a feat never repeated by any ballet company since.

[Mme. Hermine]

A review of American Ballet Theatre's Nutcracker by Gia Kourlas in The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.c...eater.html?_r=0

No matter the cast, the acrobatic choreography poses a problem. The most frightening is a lift in which the ballerina is held by one leg like a trophy as her partner dashes forward. Are the relentless lifts that melt in swoons, flamboyant turning jumps and unsupported pirouettes what a young girl imagines love to be? It feels Disney. In the end such difficulty serves little purpose; the dancers look tense, never expansive or free.

[Mme. Hermine]

A review of Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty:

http://www.independe...on-8395803.html

Quote

Matthew Bourne is far from the first choreographer to fiddle with the story of The Sleeping Beauty. And he won't be the last, such is the draw of Tchaikovsky's radiant score and the peculiar potency of the outline plot. Good and evil, youth and age, darkness and light, and the suspended animation of a typical adolescence are themes that will always invite fresh interpretation. It's some years since a sensationalist Danish production cast Beauty as a teenage junkie, the pricking of the finger a case of hypodermic overload. Bourne, going against expectation, sticks with a poisoned rose-thorn. It's only later in the game that he gleefully plays his wild card: vampires.