Tag: 06.11.00

The great Kirov Ballet has put on its detective hat to recreate the long-lost original “Sleeping Beauty.” “We will see almost every step as Tsar Alexander III saw it in 1890, almost every detail that the brilliant Marius Petipa choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary music, and every design as the ballet’s ambitious originator, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, drew it.” – The Telegraph (London)

The English National Ballet is underfunded, says its director. So he puts on a show, the critics be damned. “On our Australian tour of Swan Lake last year, our smallest audience a night was 7,800 and our largest was 11,000 – 11,000 Australians, sporty people, who stood on their feet and roared. When I’m looking at that, I don’t care what anybody says. If the productions were naff, the dancing substandard, the costumes tacky, I’d mind. But this is the highest quality you can find.” – The Sunday Times (London)

For nearly the last 15 years of his ballet career, Rudolf Nureyev “did everything possible to destroy his reputation, dancing too often, too badly, eventually too unwatchably to be anything more than classical ballet’s grimmest joke. And yet, surprisingly, almost impossibly, his artistic rehabilitation is now in full swing, fed by new evidence that, if not the greatest dancer of our era, he may well have been the most original and influential.” – Los Angeles Times