Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tiaras & Tutus. Five weeks ago, when the Sadler's Wells company of 65 bundled into two Constellations bound for New York the dancers were weighed down with uncertainty. It was costing $50,000 to bring them on their first visit to the U.S.-a place where ballet, while spreading to every nightclub and skating rink, had lost some of its popular appeal and much of its professional standing. The British Council, which would be called on to make up any losses, had bid them godspeed with the air of men watching $50,0000 or more go up in smoke...
Night after night the Met was packed to the fire-limit (for an alltime record ballet box-office gross of $256,000). In four weeks, Margot Fonteyn and Sadler's Wells had restored as much glitter to Britain's tarnished tiara as any mission the English had sent abroad since the war. In London, cartoonists put Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Ernie Bevin and Sir Stafford Cripps* into tutus, hinted that they might do well to make their next visit to the U.S. on tiptoe...
...like most genuinely successful enterprises, Sadler's Wells had a lot more than luck. It had a hard-driving director in Ninette de Valois, a graduate of Serge Diaghilev's great Ballet Russe. It had a corps de ballet drilled down to the last pas de chat, an ensemble built on the theory that it is as important to have a well-coordinated team as a great star. To put on the great "white ballets"-the classics that England's Royal Opera House company has made its specialty-it had to have both. Says U.S. Choreographer George...
Prime & Proportion. In brown-eyed, British-born Margot Fonteyn, Sadler's Wells had its coloratura. Her perfectly proportioned ballerina body (5 ft. 4 in., 112 Ibs.), her effortless grace and technique had U.S. ballet connoisseurs and critics going back for comparisons to such ballet immortals as Anna Pavlova, Olga Spessivtzeva and Tamara Karsavina, the sometime partner of the great Nijinsky. Just behind Fonteyn were two other fine dancers who could take her roles: tall, handsome Beryl Grey, 22, and flame-haired, 23-year-old Moira Shearer, dancing star of the British film The Red Shoes (which...
Castles & Caves. U.S. ballet fans, awaiting the arrival of the English company, had been eager to see Sadler's Wells' modern English ballets-with choreography by De Valois, Helpmann and Frederick Ashton. Among the best of these were De Valois' animated chess game, Checkmate, her Rake's Progress (after Hogarth's famous drawing sequence) and Ashton's gay Wedding Bouquet and impish Façade (to music by William Walton). They were performed with a brittle wit and a steely stylishness...