Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opera house's future, indications are a bit more promising. The opening week also saw the world premieres of a ballet by prominent East German Composer Udo Zimmermann and an opera by Siegfried Matthus, so perhaps Dresden's reputation as a home for new music will be at least partially restored. And Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson who maintains the family shrine at Bayreuth, will direct a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in December. But what the Semper needs is what the rest of Eastern Europe's houses need: the free exchange of singers, designers and directors...
...popularity of minimalist music spreads and the avant-garde of the '70s pushes further out into the culture, some odd alliances spring up in the artistic landscape. Who would expect to see dancers in the American Ballet Theater stride jauntily onstage carrying ordinary metal folding chairs and proceed to use them as partners? But that is what they do in Choreographer and Performance Artist David Gordon's clever new work--his first ballet ever --called Field, Chair and Mountain, and audiences on A.B.T.'s current national tour cheer them on at every performance. In a New York City Ballet premiere...
...Both ballets are casual, debonair and refreshingly free of pretension. Gordon, whose own Pick Up Co. uses dialogue as well as tapes and movement in performance, manages to shift smoothly into the more formal vocabulary of classical ballet. Field, Chair and Mountain is set to a noisy concerto by the 19th century Irish piano virtuoso John Field (thus the Field in the title). In commissioning the piece, Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov asked only that Gordon use a set, and Gordon came up with an inventive one. Executed with cheeky wit by Santo Loquasto, it unfolds from left to right like...
...choreography proceeds pretty much from left to right too. This ballet looks somewhat shallow; it does not try to fill the stage in a proper Petipa way. In most other respects it is very much in the classical style. For one thing, it takes very seriously the imperial role of its ballerina, Martine van Hamel. In the past few years Baryshnikov has invited several innovative choreographers to work for A.B.T., and not all have been successful. With her pure, ample style, Van Hamel has been much in demand and as a result has soldiered her way across some very murky...
...Eight Lines the creative exchange is reversed: a classical choreographer goes to the avant-garde for a musical inspiration. Robbins has done this with great success once before, in his 1983 hit, Glass Pieces. That ballet was a boldly theatrical vision of city life--densely populated, aggressive, peremptory, endlessly churning. Because their music is superficially quite similar, the two works are bound to be compared. Eight Lines is slighter and more evanescent but it is also more intimate and charming, and it is ravishing to look...