Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...about that point, one night last week, Sadler's Wells Star Margot Fonteyn ceased to be a ballerina and became the bird she intended to portray. The ballet: Firebird, dreamed up in 1910 for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by the late, style-making Choreographer Michel Fokine and style-shaking Composer Igor Stravinsky...
Firebird was no novelty to the U.S. The Col. de Basil company toured it in the '40s, and George Balanchine's New York City Ballet has done a shortened version -carefully avoiding such delicacies as the soul-in-the-egg. The Sadler's Wells version was faithful to the original choreography of 1910. In fact, it captured the old spirit so well that the once-daring Stravinsky music began to sound just like Mussorgsky with wrong notes...
...another new work was disastrously pretentious, a complex, often embarrassing brouhaha of heavy symbolism, mythology and sex. It told the story of Greek mythology's Tiresias, who begins as a man, is transformed into a woman, then back again. Inexplicable characters dashed in and out of the ballet, including copulating snakes and a tiny girl equipped with brass breastplates, whose face is blue-black on one side, chalk-white on the other. The production's one real merit: the sensuous dancing of dark-haired Violetta Elvin as Tiresias the Woman, and especially the moment when her partner lifts...
...Sadler's Wells foray into modernism so far has produced nothing to match the austere abstractions of the New York City Ballet, the Times Square gaieties and psychological thrillers of Ballet Theater. But Dame Ninette's charming people are truly at home and unsurpassed in the dazzling Never-Never-Land of romantic ballet...
...Hippopotamuses, quite as dumpy-dainty as Disney imagined them in his Fantasia ballet, glide and swoop and teeter-tiptoe underwater, looking like corpulent, flirtatious, middle-aged belles at a eurythmics seminar, except when they gap their incredible yaps, and let the fish swim in to pick their teeth...