Saturday, March 23

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Alberta Ballet presents "Hansel and Gretel."

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Hansel & Gretel is hands-down the most fun ballet I’ve seen in recent memory — possibly ever. The production by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, created and choreographed by Loughlan Prior, is a modern take on the age-old fairy tale, and it does not disappoint. Alberta Ballet has done an incredible job bringing it to life for local audiences.

 

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Dayton Ballet presents its final program of the season.

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“I can’t wait for Dayton’s audiences to experience this production!” says Ragland in a press statement. “We’re performing one of my favorite Balanchine works, ‘Valse-Fantaisie’ — set to music from Mikhail Glinka — and ‘Cold Virtues’ by my colleague and friend, Adam Hougland. And I’m putting the finishing touches on a yet-to-be-titled world premiere ballet highlighting Dayton Ballet Company’s athleticism, technique and artistry. Music for the world premiere is by Max Richter.”

 

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The English National Ballet and Acosta Danza are both presenting productions of "Carmen."

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[Johan] nger’s two-act version, which comes to English National Ballet after almost a decade of success in Europe, is more closely based on the novella’s plot than the opera’s libretto. In the book the story is told by Don José who looks back at the events that led to him killing Carmen. “When I read the book I was surprised by the amount of the violence. It’s quite dark,” says the 56-year-old choreographer, who lives in Seville, where the story is set (his wife, a former dancer, is Spanish). “It’s about a man not being able to accept a woman and her freedom, looking at a woman as his property.

 

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Phil Chan and Doug Fullington talk about their "reimagined" "La Bayadere" production at Indiana University.

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What can be done with a work like “Bayadère”? For Chan and Doug Fullington, a specialist in 19th-century ballet, the solution is to remove it from its exotic context and put it in a setting closer to home, the Hollywood of the 1930s. By setting the ballet in a movie-land far west, and swapping Orientalist clichés for American ones, Chan said, the team was creating “a form of exoticism that is about us, not about ‘them.’”

 

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review of Kansas City Ballet by Hilary Stroh for Bachtrack.

It’s always interesting to have a line-up of seven never-before-seen works on the program, as we did last night at Kansas City Ballet’s annual showcase of contemporary ballet, New Moves. How do we prepare ourselves for the unfamiliar? I remember reading a line from a well-known interior designer to the effect that one should always include at least one antique in a space because it grounds everything else. I feel much the same way when watching contemporary ballet.