Word: ballets
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...would expect the somewhat one-dimensional nature of the fairy tale, with its characteristic enchantment and romance, to translate predictably into the traditional ballet form. The Boston Ballet's production of Cinderella, however, offers a surprising and successful mix of fable, fantasy and farce. Ben Stevenson's unique choreography combined with David Walker's exquisite sets and costumes and the energetically unpredictable Prokofiev score create new artistic possibilities for this magical storybook tale...
...simply for the sake of the children (and there were many in this audience), the Boston Ballet could never leave out these essentials of so universal a fairy tale. Yet, twists of character and additional elements of style transcend the basic story-line, bringing an element of theater to dance. In a spirit that combines a touch of Shakespearean drama with Hasty Pudding theatricals, the ever predictable evil stepsisters are not so predictable. In the first scene of Act I, the stepsisters enter the stage dauntingly tall, grotesquely covered in makeup, and shockingly clumsy, heavy and graceless. If this contrast...
...sisters' mockery of dance both in their home and later in-front of the ball, and in their interplay with the Shakespearean court jester (dressed in the Lampoon's purple, red and yellow), the sisters offer an unexpected element of hilarity to romance and of mockery to ballet's conservatism. While offering comic relief, the cross-gender casting also fits into the old English tradition of en travestie, linking theater to dance. Finally, stylistically, the stage presence of two giant stepsisters dwarf the waif-like Cinderella, played by Jennifer Gelfand, enhancing the sense of her powerlessness. Between the cross-gender...
That is the factual background of this vivid historical novel -- part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic. Like the author herself, a former ballet dancer and granddaughter of a white slave, the narrator is an American woman residing in Britain who returns home to learn the true story of her grandfather, which he had recorded in coded diaries. Jonathan Carrick had been a "boughten boy," indentured when he was four for $15 to an ice-hearted tobacco farmer named Alvah Stoke. Dickensian is too amiable a word for Jonathan's ordeals. He slept on a dirt floor with...
...talking mime, gets caught in a bathroom that becomes an aquarium); "Hey, the human body can't do that!" (when one man climbs a Chinese pole on sheer wrist power or descends using only his thighs); and "Ooooh, that's beautiful!" (when four aerialists do a bungee-cord ballet). But no artiste is allowed to be a specialist. All must do double duty, as Harlequins or chorus girls, to fit into the precise, giddy scheme devised by director Franco Dragone and his team...