Word: ballets
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...love, all ages owe submission," wrote Alexander Pushkin. In his first major work in eight years, Choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, 69, has adapted for Britain's Royal Ballet A Month in the Country, the Ivan Turgenev play about the foolish love of an older woman for a young man. Far from sad and tormented, however, Ashton's musing on middle-age folly emerges as an airy confection of elegant humor, bittersweet lyricism and charm...
...mood and rural setting, A Month in the Country is kin to Ashton's Enigma Variations, his last important ballet, created before he retired as the Royal's director. This time Ashton's gift for evoking another age is enhanced by a musical collage of Chopin. Julia Trevelyan Oman conceived the costumes and pale beige and blue furnishings of the sumptuous dacha, with ladies in flowing skirts and gentlemen in ivory frock coats. This is quite the prettiest ballet to light the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in some time and a high light of the Royal...
There are no heroes or villains in A Month in the Country, only human beings submitting ruefully to love's power. Seymour, an inspired actress, almost dances words as well as feelings. Ashton is one of ballet's supreme storytell ers. His pas de deux resemble poems. Dowell dances a sonnet with Natalia, a schoolboy's idyl with Vera, a naughty couplet or two with a coquettish maid. The clear dance designs, all curves and spirals, are infused with his classic sensibility. Let us hope for many another Ashton delight...
Standing together, they look like mismatched members of a computer dating service. But Judith Jamison of New York's Alvin Ailey City Center Dance Co. and Mikhail Baryshnikov, celebrated defector from Russia's Kirov Ballet, will be partners all right-as dancers rather than daters. Last week the couple showed off a few moves to promote a May 11 benefit pas de deux in behalf of the Ailey troupe and Boys Harbor, Inc., a New York charity for youngsters. And how will Jamison (5 ft. 10 in.) fare with the smaller (5 ft. 6 in.) premier danseur? "Misha...
Much more literal than Black's piece is Morgenroth's "Five Aces," with music by Liszt. Five dancers from The Moving Company began by spoofing sport and ballet antics. Morgenroth saves these familiar themes from becoming cliches by developing the parodied gestures into more suggestive and complex movement sequences, fusing the non-literal and literal into an expression beyond satire...