Word: ballets
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...variety of dynamic tensions characterized all three of the works that the Boston Ballet presented last week at the Music Hall, in the opening series of performances of the 1977-78 season. The program, which ran through Sunday, began with Act II of Swan Lake, the famous moonlit encounter of a prince with the enchanted Swan-Queen. Separating this act from the full ballet proved to be something of a mutilation; it cancelled the careful dramatic architecture of the whole, forcing the audience to view the ballet as "pure dance." Yet this limited view is not totally stifling...
...ballet did have some rough edges. For one thing, it was simply too long--the Dionysian assault upon the senses that is the work's major strength cannot possibly be sustained at full intensity throughout all 27 sequences; some of the texts could be eliminated without doing violence to the whole. And not only did the movement often bear a purely arbitrary relation to the music, but also it was internally inconsistent. There were occasional bland passages of traditional ballet figures, as well as moments of apparently random borrowing from other styles, such as Indian dance. Finally, the Harvard-Radcliffe...
...final scene, which mirrors the first, the figure of Fortune is lifted above an encircling crowd: the conical form consummating the angular choreography of the work's most arresting dances--the cyclical theme exulting in the deepest pattern of all bodily life. If the overriding contrast in the Boston Ballet's performance were between a great classic's ethereality and a modern work's affirmation of the senses, there could be no doubt where the Company's own preferences...
...until she was 16, when she switched over to singing and acting. "I don't think I wanted to be a professional dancer anyway," she says now, adding, "I was always going to use it for Broadway." She has performed every summer since junior high school--with the Boston Ballet, with the Canadian National Ballet, the Canadian National Center for the Performing Arts, on and studying at the London Royal summer at 20, appearing in "Jaws II," which folded, and taking lessons at the London Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts...
...rock star merely had to portray a deaf, dumb and blind parody of himself in a rock opera that his group had created. Nureyev was asked to bring to life one of the all-time classic leading men in cinema history, a giant of an era that the ballet virtuoso never knew. The role demands a certain presence, a knack for walking into a roomful of gaping admirers and creating an aura. Some scenes seem structured with this purpose in mind; at one point. Nureyev completely upstages a porcine-looking boor in a fashionable Manhattan night club by sweeping...