Jump to content
This Site Uses Cookies. If You Want to Disable Cookies, Please See Your Browser Documentation. ×

volcanohunter

Senior Member
  • Posts

    5,633
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by volcanohunter

  1. I attended the first three performances of the triple bill. I am completely baffled by the decision to present William Yong’s UtopiVerse, given its thematic similarity to Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, premiered a year and a half earlier. I am just as baffled that Hope Muir didn’t point out to Yong that 40 minutes was just too long for his piece. UtopiVerse is pompous, bloated and, in my case, literally sleep-inducing. The movement vocabulary is uninventive. The signature move has the dancers grabbing their left ankle/foot/shin and extending it to their foreheads again and again. There is also a repeated modern-style renversé on a bent supporting leg, with the arms thrown behind the back with clawed hands. There are enormous video projections of dancers, which inevitably dwarf the action on stage (they always do), little glowing cubes signifying…I dunno, and a large metal oval above the stage that rises and falls. The program stated that “UtopiVerse presents an alternative way of seeing traditional notions of utopia, paradise lost, the Garden of Eden, human evolution and the meaning of God. These iconic ideas are reimagined, each in its unique futuristic context, challenging our preconceived notions and inviting us to explore new dimensions of thought. “The ballet dances between the domains of the hidden and the overt, unveiling the complexities of information and misinformation. Dancers embody the ever-shifting landscapes of truth and illusion, evoking a deep sense of wonder. On stage they embark on a journey of different mindsets, exploring the ideas of inventing, rediscovering, engineering and rerouting to forge a new utopia.” I saw nothing that fit that description. I did see Christopher Gerty, dressed like a Franco-era tourism poster, and Ben Rudisin both looking extremely uncomfortable in the choreography and vaguely embarrassed. In the second cast Noah Parets and Siphesihle November fared a little better. The saving grace was Emma Ouellet, who has a wonderfully grounded quality of movement. Had the music been less substantial, the shortcomings of the piece might have been less obvious. The score consisted of various and sundry pieces by Benjamin Britten, including the first movement of his violin concerto, well played by Alexi Kenney. This worked for dancing. Two excerpts from Britten’s string quartets did not. There were also a few selections from Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Hans van Manen made a ballet to the entire piece, and it occurred to me that had the bill included his Frank Bridge Variations instead, it would have made for a much better program: less pretentious and more concise. Emma Portner’s islands was conceived as a commentary about how classical tutus physically distance women in ballet. So instead she dressed them in a conjoined pair of four-legged trousers. The first part of the duet plays on optical illusions in which the audience tries to figure out which legs belong to whom. (This is hardly a new idea; it has been used often enough by circus clowns and vaudevillians.) In the second part of the duet the trousers come off and they dance as if joined head-to-head, which looks a lot like typical contact improvisation. In the third part they separate and dance mostly side by side in unison. I thought the pairing of Heather Ogden and Ouellet on the first night was most effective in putting the piece across. I didn’t appreciate Hope Muir’s “suggestion” that the piece also be danced by a man and a woman. Sure, a man can physically perform the choreography, but the point of the piece is lost. Furthermore, Alexandra MacDonald’s legs did not look as though they could possibly belong to Alexander Skinner, so the visual element was dulled as well. What that pairing showed us is that women are bendier, and men have a higher vertical jump. During the intermission I also observed that the queue to the men's toilet was shorter than the queue to the women's toilet. Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc proved to be an enormous challenge for the company. Lacking the numbers of the Paris Opera Ballet, the National Ballet’s staging had the Adage and La Flûte performed by the same ballerina, who also did the fouettés in the finale. The female soloist of the Thème Varié performed the manège in the finale. And the company followed POB practice by having the Mazurka soloist do the diagonal of barrel turns and the Adage man do the manège that follows. On opening night Monika Haczkiewicz gave confident performance in La Sieste, while Svetlana Lunkina and Harrison James danced a marvellously regal Adage, followed by her highly refined Flûte. Everyone in between looked terrified to varying degrees. The dancers were vexed by the tight swivels in fifth from croisé on one side to croisé on the other side, by the quick changes from effacé to croisé and back again, by the super-slow fouettés, and by the weight shifts back and forth between en avant and arabesque. There was little chance of them dancing with the requisite French articulation or style. I found myself railing against the state of the company’s classical technique: it should be dancing Bournonville, it should be dancing a lot more Balanchine, there need to be frequent performances of Etudes and Suite en Blanc, different teachers need to be hired to teach class!!! On the second night there was finally a majestic Thème Varié. Koto Ishihara looked much happier here than in the Pas de Cinq the night before (and did a sensational manège in the finale). Thanks to Naoya Ebe and James in that section and Lunkina in La Cigarette, we finally saw some first-class entrechat-six. Ayano Haneishi, making her debut a day early, seemed totally at ease in the Pas de Cinq. On the third night 19-year-old Aidan Tully delivered by far the best Mazurka I saw. Although he didn’t have much in the way of batterie, I admired the elegance and musicality of Donald Thom. I also admired how Tene Ward shot out of the wings like an arrow in her diagonal in the finale. Emerson Dayton has lovely fouettés, even if she didn’t finish them immaculately the first time out. By the third performance the dancers looked much more confident and at ease, though my opinions about Bournonville, Balanchine, Etudes/Suite en Blanc and more persnickety teachers stand. On opening night Charles Jude, who had staged Suite en Blanc for the company, came out for a bow. I was sorry that most people in the audience didn’t seem to know who he was.
  2. When she was young, the technique of Agnès Letestu was the eighth wonder of the world. She remains unsurpassed in ballets such Suite en Blanc and Etudes.
  3. I wasn't going to post anything until after seeing multiple casts, but this is more of a public service announcement for people who haven't yet seen the program. Arrive 40 minutes late. Utopiverse is a colossal turkey.
  4. I remember that Susan Stroman's Contact didn't even have live music, but it won four Tonys, including best musical.
  5. I imagine that from a logistical point of view NYCB tours have always been easier and less expensive to mount, given that they don't involve transporting big sets and multiple changes of elaborate costumes. (I would also point out that Hughson's current company, the National Ballet of Canada, tours precious little, often just three performances annually in Ottawa, 280 miles from Toronto. I'm not saying he doesn't have experience planning tours, just that he hasn't overseen a lot of them over the past ten years.)
  6. On Tuesday, April 2nd, the Paris Opera Ballet will livestream Don Quixote, starting at 19:30 CET/1:30 pm Eastern. After that it will be available on demand for 7 days. It is scheduled to star Sae Eun Park and Paul Marque. The stream costs €14.90 to rent. It is included in Paris Opera Play subscriptions. https://play.operadeparis.fr/en/p/don-quixote-2024
  7. P.S. Evidently the severely slimmed-down program and QR code from the beginning of the season didn't go down well with audiences. A partial program with synopsis and cast list is back, though without rosters or lists of donors. I still think the full roster of dancers should be included.
  8. I'm sorry to read that this practice has reached the New York Philharmonic. In the provinces orchestras have been playing film scores and backup for aged rockers for decades. I had naively thought that the NYPhil had evaded pops programming.
  9. This run of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been hugely successful: 15 sold-out shows, with only standing room available. This despite the fact that tickets are expensive, and the ballet is on the long side and more dependent on scenic effects than choreography. The first act in particular drags, and, as is not infrequently the case with Christopher Wheeldon’s ballets, depends on the ability of dancers to insert meaning that isn’t always present in the choreography itself. Characters such as the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Duchess and the Cook are clearly drawn, but unfortunately I don’t think that’s true of Alice or the Knave, and in those cases the dancers have to do the work. To my mind, the Act 1 sequence of Alice shrinking and growing is too long, as is her variation in Act 2. The duets for Alice and the Knave are downright formulaic, and inevitably I found myself looking at something else: the nervous White Rabbit at the back of the stage, the flirtation of the Cook and the Executioner in the downstage left corner, even the musicians in the orchestra pit. I think I wasn’t alone, because I could hear the audience laughing in unison with me. Earlier Alices Jillian Vanstone, Sonia Rodriguez and Elena Lobsanova have all left the stage, and Miyoko Koyasu has been demoted to one of Alice’s sisters (and a whole bunch of other corps roles). So this run saw four new Alices, although I saw only Tirion Law on March 10 and 12. Law is an appealing dancer, she moves beautifully and shows real stamina, but at this point her acting looks like a few stock expressions – broad smile, wide-eyed amazement, furrowed brow and pout. This projects well, but there aren’t many nuances and undercurrents of complex feelings. She and Naoya Ebe had little chemistry. But when Law danced briefly with the Caterpillar, performed by her real-life husband Peng-Fei Jiang, then her eyes really sparkled. I thought Donald Thom was superb as the White Rabbit, not as nervy or physically extreme as Edward Watson had been, but an excellent and very detailed characterization with rapid dancing. Spencer Hack as the Duchess was a riot: hugely vivid and theatrical, particularly when lusting after Jiang’s sinuous Caterpillar in the trial scene. Points also to the crazed Cook of Jordana Daumec, Siphesihle November as the Fish Footman and especially Noah Parets as the Frog Footman. However, Ben Rudisin struggled a bit as the Mad Hatter. It was strange to find him more vivid as the Magician in the first scene than at his titular tea party, where he didn’t come across as especially mad, and where his tapping sometimes fell behind the music. During the trial scene he came across as more convincingly crazy, but on the 12th conductor David Briskin had to slow down the music considerably during Rudisin’s manège. Rudisin is very tall, much taller than Steven McRae. During his entrance from under his little proscenium, wearing his tall hat, Rudisin had to stoop down to get from under it. But I don’t believe that tall dancers can’t tap. Rudisin isn’t as tall as Tommy Tune. Svetlana Lunkina as the Queen of Hearts dove into her role with relish. Her character appears only fleetingly in the first two acts, but when she was rolled out on stage in the third act in her enormous red dress/armor, the expression on her face seemed to announce to the audience that now the real fun would begin. I, too, am puzzled by the replacement of one of the Queen’s male flunkies with a female dressed differently, not least because the parody of the Rose Adage becomes less obvious. She was a sort of no-nonsense woman who would volunteer first, while the three men cowered with quaking knees. In other words, they were funny, and she was not. But why was she unafraid of the Queen when the other women of the court were peering fearfully from behind hedges? Lunkina is not as tall as Zenaida Yanowsky, who was too tall ever to have danced Princess Aurora. So there are no height jokes, and Lunkina’s cavaliers were all tall. Nor is she short and dumpy as illustrations of the Queen of Hearts usually depict her. Lunkina is a genuine Princess Aurora, and the comedy of the tart adage stems from her frustration with the ineptitude of her partners and her particular brand of gleeful derangement. Although during the croquet game, she was menacing and elicited vocal sympathy from the audience for the pursued hedgehogs. The central scene of her interpretation comes in the variation at the beginning of the trial scene, which she invests with a wide range of dynamics and mercurial mood shifts, ranging from the way she stomps on pointe and pounds her fists, to her sexy little tango with the executioner. It’s a pity Lunkina doesn’t get to do more comedy, because she’s very game (not least the way she topples backward at the end) and very witty. And of course there was Rex Harrington as her King, hamming it up with obvious satisfaction.
  10. He's in his tenth season with the National Ballet of Canada, and as far as I know, at least up until Covid-19, the company was posting budget surpluses every year.
  11. The triple bill is proving to be a tough sell, especially with two mostly unknown properties on the program and the fact that people just shelled out for expensive tickets to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, often with multiple kids in tow. So the company is offering a 50% [!!!] discount with the code NIGHTOUT . Discount codes were quite common several seasons ago, but I can't recall a discount this steep.
  12. Isn't it true that Simone Messmer had a conversation with Helgi Tomasson about why he couldn't give her a principal contract when she joined the company? After all, Mathilde Froustey had been hired as a principal even though she hadn't held a comparable rank in Paris, so Messmer had hoped for the same. I also remember that Sascha Radetsky left ABT to dance as a principal in Amsterdam, but when he returned to New York it was once again as a soloist, and that's the rank with which he retired. Mukhamedov is now in her early thirties, so the window for moving to another company to dance as a principal is closing. That's not to say that she couldn't dance for another ten years. And there have been dancers promoted to principal in their late thirties. But another company may be wary of hiring a dancer her age with a history of injuries, especially when they have their own up-and-comers rising through the ranks.
  13. Stafford went all in with Mira Nadon, hiring her at 16 and promoting her to principal when she was 21, despite the fact that she had lost a year and a half of her young career to the pandemic shutdown. Of course, Nadon is also a once-in-a-generation dancer.
  14. Batterie isn't something invented by ballet dancers. There are lots of pas de bourrées and basic jetés in traditional dance, and also heel-clicking. I'm sure the cabriole and jeté battu existed before ballet began to codify them. Beated jumps won't always look the way that ballet dancers execute them, but those are differences in performing style, and I don't think ballet should have a monopoly on those steps.
  15. Apart from Eterna Iberia, which "balletic" pieces did the company perform? I am familiar with Eritaña, which includes lots of batterie, and this is native to Spanish dance, not an interpolation from ballet. (I realize it's a flamenco festival, but the artistic mandate of the National Ballet of Spain is broader than that.)
  16. Casting for the mixed bill on 20-24 March, featuring William Yong's UtopiVerse, Emma Portner's Islands and Serge Lifar's Suite en Blanc. UtopiVerse Lotus Koto Ishihara (March 20, 22 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Tirion Law (March 21, 23 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Leo Ben Rudisin (March 20, 22 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Siphesihle November (March 21, 23 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) The Daemon Christopher Gerty (March 20, 22 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Noah Parets (March 21, 23 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) The Undermined Emma Oulette islands Heather Ogden and Emma Ouellet (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Alexandra MacDonald and Alexander Skinner (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Hannah Galway and Jenna Savella (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Suite en Blanc La Sieste Chelsy Meiss, Tene Ward, Monika Haczkiewicz (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Chelsy Meiss, Alexandra MacDonald, Calley Skalnik (Mar 21, 23 mat) Clare Peterson, Selene Guerrero-Trujillo, Monika Haczkiewicz (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Thème Varié Brenna Flaherty, Donald Thom, Larkin Miller (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Koto Ishihara, Naoya Ebe, Harrison James (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Calley Skalnik, Peng-Fei Jiang, Larkin Miller (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Sérénade Isabella Kinch (March 20, 21, 22, 23 at 7:30 pm) Brenna Flaherty (March 23, 24 at 2:00 pm) Presto (pas de cinq) Koto Ishihara (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Jeannine Haller (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Ayano Haneishi (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Isaac Wright, David Preciado, Scott McKenzie, Noah Parets (March 20, 22, 23 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) Keaton Leier, Kota Sato, Josh Hall, Alexander Skinner (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) La Cigarette Calley Skalnik (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Svetlana Lunkina (March 21, 22 at 7:30 pm/ March 23, 24 at 2:00 pm) Mazurka Spencer Hack (March 20 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Siphesihle November (March 21 at 7:30 pm) Aidan Tully (March 22 at 7:30 pm) Naoya Ebe (March 23 at 7:30 pm) Harrison James (March 24 at 2:00 pm) Adage Svetlana Lunkina, Harrison James (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Heather Ogden, Ben Rudisin (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Emerson Dayton, Spencer Hack (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) La Flûte Svetlana Lunkina (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Heather Ogden (March 21 at 7:30 pm/ March 23, 24 at 2:00 pm) Emerson Dayton (March 22 at 7:30 pm) Harrison James, Donald Thom, Larkin Miller (March 20, 23 at 7:30 pm) Ben Rudisin, Naoya Ebe, Harrison James (March 21 at 7:30 pm/March 23 at 2:00 pm) Spencer Hack, Peng-Fei Jiang, Larkin Miller (March 22 at 7:30 pm/March 24 at 2:00 pm) https://national.ballet.ca/Productions/New-Yong-Islands-Suite-en-Blanc
  17. I finally relented when the season went past The Nutcracker and Swan Lake and bought access to the final three streams for $120.
  18. Thank you for the explanation. I remember that Boston Ballet has purchased retired Royal Ballet productions in the past, and that these often look terrific decades after they were first used. Personally, I'm very pleased that they don't end up on a scrap heap and are rented by companies far beyond Boston.
  19. On Sunday, March 24th, at 18:30 CET/1:30 pm Eastern, the Vienna State Ballet will livestream the company premiere of John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camellias. The performance should be available on demand for 72 hours. The stream is free of charge, and registration requires only a name and email. The scheduled cast includes Ketevan Papava as Marguerite Gauthier, Timoor Afshar as Armand Duval, Hyo-Jung Kang as Manon Lescaut, Marcos Menha as Des Grieux, Ioanna Avraam as Prudence Duvernoy, Masayu Kimoto as Gaston Rieux and Elena Bottaro as Olympia. https://play.wiener-staatsoper.at/event/4dfb69e2-63b2-4be0-9ded-6af3a9a56fa1
  20. As was pointed out by Marsha Lederman in the Globe and Mail, Marco Goecke’s planned piece for the company is not, despite the advertising, a world premiere, but a retitled adaptation of his duet Nachtmerrie, which was first presented by the Stuttgart Ballet in 2021. https://www.seeingdance.com/stuttgart-ballet-new-works-210701/
  21. It will probably be altered beyond recognition, and not in a good way. Welch seems to like to tinker for the sake of tinkering. Granted, it's not especially recent, but his Bayadère is the most awful I've seen.
  22. Yes, it is, but for me it's curious that the new production of Ashton's Cinderella is a joint effort between the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, but Ballet West will show it before the latter.
×
×
  • Create New...