Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jerome Robbins? "Too self-obsessed. He's forgotten his point of view. He is not pushing forward any more." Martha Graham? "She thinks everything is expressible through a new technique." The Royal Ballet? "Too tradition-bound." The Bolshoi? "Too obsessed with characterization and athletics." The Kirov? "The finest in the world." Balanchine? "The greatest influence on ballet and dance in the Western world. He is pushing forward." So says the San Francisco Ballet's Lew Christensen, who in his 17 years in San Francisco has developed his company into one of the most versatile anywhere, and second only...
Graceful Combat. Though he acknowledges his allegiance to Balanchine, Christensen's distinctive trait as a choreographer is that he has no readily identifiable style, prefers to let the subject define the method. Last week the San Francisco Ballet shoved off on a two-month cross-country tour with two new Christensen ballets-Lucifer and Life: A Do-It-Yourself Disaster-prime examples of the diversity that has become the company's trademark...
Life is pop ballet, a modern parable that mocks contemporary values. To the stabbing atonal music of Charles Ives, the dancers move through four stages of life against a background of giant flats of pop art-IBM cards, an ice-cream cone, green stamps, comic-strip characters. By contrast, Lucifer is classical ballet, eschewing pantomime and narrative for a more abstract visualization of Hindemith's austere Concert Music for Strings and Brass. After the angels assemble for "a typical day in heaven," Lucifer appears, defiant and strutting, and engages in graceful combat with Archangel Michael, only to be felled...
Williams, who plays the high post position in Harvard's three-guard offense, has to endure a barrage of pushing, shoving, hooking, and grabbing that would send any believer in the graceful ballet of basketball home shaking his head...
Enow is what the show conspicuously lacks. It certainly does not have enow dancing or enow music. The Baker Street Irregulars test the floorboards occasionally and the boards hold. Three ballet boys garrote one of Holmes's trusty lieutenants in an artily choreographed frenzy of mincing violence. From time to time, the orchestra strikes up, but scarcely tunes. Where there's smoke, there's fog, and that is where most of the London atmosphere comes from, except for a rooftop view of the Diamond Jubilee Parade through Trafalgar Square, with tiny Grenadier Guard puppets and the Queen...