Word: ballets
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...opera fans feared that the last refuge of the plus-size artist was gone. Two years later, Voigt has had gastric-bypass surgery and lost 135 lbs. (the equivalent, roughly, of one Mariah Carey) and the Royal Opera has rehired her for the 2007-08 season. Maybe the Royal Ballet will hire her next...
...from Pittsburgh, Pa., could tap like a demon (he did a terrific trio with the Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate), but Kelly's real aspiration was to create a fully American form of dance: ballet with machismo. Compared with the slim, elegant Astaire, Kelly was Everyman, all man. And for a wonderful while, he did it all: sang, danced, acted, choreographed and directed. Singin' in the Rain is his masterpiece, but there's lots more to savor in Robert Trachtenberg's excellent...
George Balanchine was the great melder of high and popular art in dance. The young Russian came to the U.S. in 1933 and worked on Broadway, in Hollywood and for the circus (devising a piece for 14 elephants) before starting the New York City Ballet in 1948 and creating works from Stravinsky (39 in all) and Tchaikovsky (the perennial Nutcracker). He said his mission was to "entertain the public" as well as elevate it. This 1984 documentary does both...
...many girls saw this 1948 English musical melodrama and, no matter what the heroine's fate, decided to put on ballet slippers? Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's fevered parable of ballet's uneasy kinship of music and dance turned an art-business into a battlefield of egos, lusts and near demonic possessiveness. It established Anton Walbrook as the Svengali of his day and made a star of Moira Shearer...
Shearer's Royal Ballet colleague Margot Fonteyn was by 1948 the world's top ballet dancer. Her grace, sense of drama and ability to remain en pointe for seemingly minutes on end won her wide acclaim (and the cover of TIME). Later, when she was in her 40s, she found new life and a new lover with young Rudolf Nureyev. But her story was gaudier than her renown: the stuff of affairs, abortions, gunrunning for her Panamanian husband, an old age stripped of wealth, burial in a pauper's grave. Tony Palmer's thrilling 2005 documentary brims with pertinent clips...