Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SICK LITTLE girl in a woman's body, Empress Phylissa doesn't know her powers. Drooling, a finger hooked over her lower lip, the beauty never guesses that her bedroom's an asylum. She makes you wrench, as do all the characters in The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre's The Menagerie of Empress Phylissa performed last week at the Loeb...
Director Henryk Tomaszewski has turned a traditional ballet scenario--a young princess looking over various suitors in order to choose a husband--into a grotesque, surrealistic fantasy. All Phylissa's wooers first enter gallantly, then run scared as her lust switches on. Little Napoleon, terror-struck, stabs himself in the groin. Max-Pipifax makes it further, to bed with the empress, only to be eaten by her highness--who proceeds to throw up on his flesh. The two are hardly men, nor are the rabble of other lewd cavaliers, truly Phylissa's menagerie of beasts...
...revolting theater--unreality becoming superreal--in the tradition of Franz Wedekind, early twentieth-century dramatist of the grotesque whose "The Queen from New Fun Land" inspired the ballet. Perhaps another influence is Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud's heir, whose company is based, along with The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre, in Wroclaw, Poland...
...pity that A.B.T. did not give this extraordinary galaxy of talents something more interesting to do. Milwaukee-born Neumeier, 33, was a disciple of John Cranko, the late artistic director of the Stuttgart Ballet. Cranko's tender Romeo and Juliet and rollicking The Taming of the Shrew showed that good ballets can be based on Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet Connotations proves that choreographers can make bad ones as well. Set to a trio of astringent pieces by Aaron Copland, Neumeier's stripped-down, expressionistic dance is simplistically Oedipal: Mother Gertrude seems as much in love with...
...displayed as partners in better works. Bruhn's Claudius was a cold, imperious, lecherous king. It is to Neumeier's credit that his choreography asks Bruhn to do more demanding dancing than anything he has attempted since coming out of retirement last year. As for Haydee - perhaps ballet's reigning actress-dancer - her Gertrude was a startlingly erotic embodiment of lust. Seeing her wrapped sensuously about Baryshnikov, one can believe that some of the most startling love positions in the Kama Sutra are, after all, humanly possible...