Monday, February 5

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Reviews of Pacific Northwest Ballet in "Swan Lake."

The Seattle Times

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“Swan Lake,” with its two wickedly difficult central roles, is also a showcase for the two dancers playing Odette/Odile (a dual role of the swan woman and her evil, black-clad doppelgänger) and the lovesick Prince Siegfried. Over opening weekend, I watched four brilliant principal dancers make the ballet their own. Lucien Postlewaite, on Friday’s opening night, played Siegfried in Act I as world-weary and a little bored, at one point sadly staring into a glass as if wishing it held some magic elixir. That magic comes in Act II, in the form of the remarkable Leta Biasucci, whose melancholy Odette was so delicate, so exquisitely tentative in her movements that you instantly believed she was part bird; her arms, with precise angles and isolations, movingly became wings. Their Act II pas de deux — him thunderstruck by love — was beautifully careful; she seemed so fragile that a touch might break her.

The Stranger

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Postlewaite also carefully tended to his character's transformation, starting him out as charismatic reveler and slowly turning him into a gallant, lovesick prince. Watching him lift Biasucci throughout the show was like watching god placing stars in the sky. Effortless rise. Impossibly high. And Biasucci held firm, as if the force of love itself had levitated her into the air rather than the mere muscle and bone of her partner's steady hands. 

 

[dirac]

A review of the Norwegian National Ballet by Graham Watts for Bachtrack.

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This premiere of Diamonds pre-empts the programming of Balanchine’s full-length Jewels in the coming Autumn. Based on this sparkling performance, it promises to be a wonderful new acquisition to set alongside other Balanchine gems in this Norwegian collection. With costumes on loan from the Royal Ballet, copied from Karinska’s original designs and an authentic staging by Jean-Marc Puissant, this performance was exquisite from first to last. Diamonds is a challenging ballet, which starts so slowly to expose the precise technique of every movement and finishes with galloping grandeur.