Word: ballets
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...featuring a demented tango, ragtime gone wrong, a satanic mockery of a Bach chorale, and countless other musical japes in the story of a soldier who sells his soul to the Devil, wins it back and finally loses it again. The Prokofiev is also dramatic, originally composed for a ballet about a circus. The Moscow Chamber Ensemble, led by Gennedy Rozhdestvensky, has just the right touch for both: cool, brusque, almost offhandish virtuosity...
...world première last week of Roland Petit's Paradise Lost - no direct kin, obviously, to John Milton's sturdy epic of the same name. Neon eggs are unusual enough, but more unusual was the fact that the work was hatched by London's Royal Ballet, the venerable guardian of traditional repertory. What is more, the roles of Adam and Eve were danced by the foremost duo in romantic ballet, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn...
...that sort of daring was exactly what the Royal Danish Ballet was looking for. Typical of the new look he has given the Danes is his flashy new production of Bartok's nightmarish The Miraculous Mandarin, which has been running in Copenhagen for the past few weeks. A series of taut opening scenes, ominously underscored by Bartok's crashing, nervous music, sets the sordid story: a leering, undulating streetwalker lures her men to a shadowy room where a trio of gangsters beat and rob them. The last victim is a hideously ugly, stooped Chinese mandarin, danced by Flindt...
Boldly, he choreographed "total theater," in which a work was not "evaluated solely on the intricacy of its movements but on its overall theatrical impact." His first full-length ballet was a total-theater version of The Three Musketeers, a romp-and-stomp spectacle in which the Danish swashbucklers made Douglas Fairbanks look like a party poop. Later, he enlivened and internationalized his programs with Afternoon of a Faun by America's Jerome Robbins, Card Game by South Africa's John Cranko, Aimez-vous Bach by Canada's Brian MacDonald, and Agon by Denmark's First...
...least of the company's attractions is the passionately extroverted dancing of Flindt himself, who spells his strong roster of male soloists at least once a week. Trained at the Royal Ballet, Flindt twice left the company to roam the world, dancing with a wide variety of troupes, most recently the Paris Opera Ballet. Having brought all that he learned back home, Flindt now fills his hall for every new program. The venerable ballet of Denmark is clearly in the hands of a Royal flash...