Word: ballets
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ESCHEWING THE nostalgic ground already covered by the two That's Entertainments. That's Dancing is not simply a collection of dance highlights. It's an ambitious attempt to touch on all the bases of modern dance--from break dancing to ballet. Accordingly, its five sections include clips from distant, lands and as distant times as film could record. But, of course, it's the precious leftovers from the That's Entertainments that make That's Dancing worthwhile...
...paths of ballet companies are apparently no less star-crossed than those of lovers. Despite the fairly plentiful literature of full-length works available, both A.B.T. and Joffrey are staging expensive, opulent productions & based on Shakespeare's tragedy and set to Sergei Prokofiev's marvelous score. The Joffrey version premiered in Washington last Dec. 12, and A.B.T.'s followed it into the Kennedy Center last week...
...would not be a serious mistake to buy tickets to either Romeo, but A.B.T. has the stronger ballet and the superior staging. Both productions are almost ostentatiously grand. In neither is there a hint that Shakespeare set his story during a heat wave; the ladies are swathed in pounds of velvet, silk and gilt. But Designer Nicholas Georgiadis puts on a more magnificent ball in A.B.T.'s $900,000 show, and his Juliet is exquisitely costumed...
Both versions are strongly influenced by the 1940 Kirov production by Leonid Lavrovsky, who worked closely with Prokofiev. This is the composer's best ballet music: rich, copiously dramatic, with a sunny spiritual radiance in the love scenes. Cranko set it first for the ballet of La Scala in 1958 and four years later for his own fledgling troupe, the Stuttgart Ballet. He was able to show off his inexperienced dancers without exposing their deficiencies with anything too intricate. That approach well suits the Joffrey youngsters, whose average...
Cranko's Romeo is nearly as much a theater piece as a ballet. The second act, with its clowns and gypsies and with its great duel scene, is easily the best, and the Joffrey performs it with sweep and charging bravura. Elsewhere there are difficulties, some of which should disappear as the company settles into the work. Right now the dancers have absurd ideas of rich life in the Renaissance. The men strut and pose, the ladies arch their backs so radically that they look poised for a back flip. An exception is Gerel Hilding, whose Tybalt has genuine authority...