Word: ballets
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Perverse Roses. From the first lurid hint that Béjart's Faust was a little special, everyone hoped for the worst. Béjart, 37, has a well-burnished reputation as an enfant terrible director of theater, ballet and opera. His talent for welding all three together into erotic iconoclastic visions of such works as The Merry Widow and The Tales of Hoffmann has made his name a café cliché: "style Béjart" means art that is mercilessly frank...
...into the score (out of veneration for Berlioz), Béjart saved himself for the "illustrations"--as he calls his scenes and dance sequences. Gargoyles dance a twist to parody the Last Supper, and the "sons of the Danube" show up in SS uniforms. The corps de ballet wear costumes that come close to perfection in their imitation of nudity, and their dances have an angular brutality. Faust appears as the prisoner of a giant glob of seaweed, suspended above the stage in a play of lights that have the harsh glare of misery. Mephistopheles is a sexual chameleon...
...town before they began their battle: "Paroxysms of vulgarity," "A universe of fantasy and poetry." SHOULD BÉJART BE BURNED? said one headline. Back home in Brussels, Béjart announced that he would put opera aside for the time being and concentrate on ballet...
Playing Pygmalion. Helene Rochas's mother was one of France's first women dentists. Her father, a World War I hero who was fond of gambling, left his family little when he died. Helene took ballet lessons, became at seven the youngest of "The Opera Rats," and hoped for a career on the stage. At 18, she met Marcel Rochas-in the Metro...
...much good music weren't enough, choreographer Bob Walsh and twelve dancers capped the evening with an eye-filling jazz ballet of Richard Rodgers' Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. The audience's attention stayed riveted from the moment that Nancy Tobey, as The Stripper, began to take off her clothes. The lovers (Walsh and Linda Townsend), various thugs and madams (Mark Cohen, John Kronenberger, Jane Greengold), and a slew of undergraduate cops and whores helped make the production a highly entertaining...