Word: dancers
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Aside from being the best American dancer-actress of the 20th century, GWEN VERDON, in every cell of her body, held the moves and spirit of her great collaborator, Bob Fosse. In her 70s, Gwen created the musical Fosse, willing his work into immortality through new dancers, not so much teaching as illuminating them, lighting each like a candle, startling and inspiring with a sudden and impossible whirl, a back-arched, hip-winked, sly-smiled thrust of her hands in which each finger had a job and a mind of its own, not so much defying time and gravity...
...India, La Bayadere depicts the love story between Solor, a renowned warrior, and Nikya, a temple dancer. This performance features the petite Larissa Ponomarenko as Nikya, with Yury Yanowsky in the role of Solor. Although the couple is well-matched, they lack polish in their pas de deux, with shifty landings in their lifts and a lack of sustained movement that sometimes overshadows their individual technical brilliance. The absence of an emotional connection between the couple also seems to underscore the technical faults. Still, Ponomarenko enthuses with her fluid, well-placed positions, displaying long, beautifully shaped arabesque lines that defy...
...question of beauty, asked differently, is about the moment at which art reaches such a high point of perfection that it retreats again into the inimitable, the unconstructable, the unconscious. The difference between impeccable grooming and beauty is the same leap between high intelligence and genius, a trained dancer and a kid with rhythm, or academic fluency and native fluency in language...
...these masterpieces of emotional pornography, jotting down derisive notes. Oh, if the contrivance is blatant enough, I may get a bit teary; it is, after all, no more difficult for filmmakers to make an audience cry by depicting, say, a child in jeopardy than it is for a lap dancer to evoke an erection in her client. At the end I have the gloomy certitude that moviegoers will love Ghost or Cinema Paradiso or The Full Monty every bit as much as I disliked it. There--I've said it. Is everyone alienated...
Billy Elliot, the new British film about an 11-year-old from a coal-mining town who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a prime example of elevated kitsch. Written by playwright Lee Hall, Billy echoes most of the manipulative inspirational films of the past 20 years. The movie could be called Chariots of Flashdance, Strictly Ballet, Smile--Life Is Beautiful! Audience members, already primed to love a losers-win story about a poor boy with big dreams, don't have to bring anything to the film, because director Stephen Daldry does all the work for them. Sentimental movies...