Saturday, March 7

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A review of San Francisco Ballet's only performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Rachel Howard for The San Francisco Chronicle.

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Sandra Jennings, répétiteur for the Balanchine Trust, has pulled off a wonder that testifies to the strength of the current company. She staged a ballet that requires 100 dancers and 25 children — and features a flotilla of gut-busting principal roles — in just three weeks (plus a little touching up last month). Balanchine’s “Midsummer,” created in 1962 for his New York City Ballet, packs the entire Shakespeare plot plus some of the most difficult solos and pas de deux ever devised into two acts and two hours. Yet every scene on opening night looked assured, and much more than that: relished.

 

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A review of the Joffrey Ballet by Steven Winn in the Chronicle.

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Ballet dancers lift each other all the time. But the elevation achieved in “Beyond the Shore,” the glowing highlight of the Joffrey Ballet’s weekend repertory at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, seemed to untether one dancer from gravity itself.

 

[dirac]

Lyon Opera Ballet performs at the Adelaide Festival.

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In the second version, by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the ambience is more informal, the choreography freer, the recording (Debussy Quartet) more ferocious and uninhibited. Eight dancers in dark suits roll and tumble across the floor or leap and fall in casual formations that are more West Side Story than Swan Lake.