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Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005 Sometimes I wish we could TiVo live performances. I’m thinking just now of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Don Quixote. It had some marvelous moments, one of which I’d be happy to revisit in perpetuity—when I saw it the second time I was amazed […]

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005 Ever on the lookout for lavishly decorated program-length story ballets—the sort of entertainment the general dance-going public apparently prefers to sterner affairs—American Ballet Theatre joined the U.K.’s Royal Ballet to revive Frederick Ashton’s 1952 Sylvia. The ballet is […]

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005 American Ballet Theatre seems to ricochet between desperate attempts at “making it new” and revisiting its past repertory and honoring it with revivals. A quartet of this season’s golden oldies formed a program of their own—the “Fokine Celebration”, […]

From June 3 – 11, 2005, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, the Royal Danish Ballet celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of August Bournonville, the dancer, choreographer, and ballet master who made the company unique and gave it its international cachet. In a SEEING THINGS series called “Total Immersion,” I wrote 15 essays about the […]

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 / Operan, the Royal Theatre’s new house for opera and ballet With the Bournonville Festival, the Royal Danish Ballet looked back to the past and offered telling examples of how it intends to preserve its singular choreographic and stylistic legacy. Appropriately, the […]

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 When I titled my series of articles on the Royal Danish Ballet’s 3rd Bournonville Festival “Total Immersion,” I truly meant total. In the 13 pieces preceding this one, I aimed to concentrate on covering all the performances of the existing Bournonville ballets—which […]

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 The evening of the final, gala, performance in the Royal Danish Ballet’s Bournonville Festival opened with Queen Margrethe II’s entering the Royal Box—as she had every night of the nine-day celebration—to smile down benignly at the audience that had risen in respectful […]

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 I first saw Bournonville’s A Folk Tale in 1979, at a dress rehearsal to which journalists who’d made the pilgrimage to Copenhagen for the first Bournonville Festival had been invited. (A Royal Danish Ballet dress rehearsal means a full-fledged, uninterrupted performance with […]

Royal Danish Ballet: Bournonville Festival / Royal Theatre, Copenhagen / June 3-11, 2005 Just about everyone agrees that, among Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice is the “perfect” one, the technical dazzler, and that Emma is the most profound. But Janeites usually have a personal—idiosyncratic—favorite, and mine is Persuasion. I’d be the first to admit […]

Sylfider, Trolde og Linselus: En Fotografisk Rejse i Bournonvilles Balletter (Sylphides and Trolls Caught in the Lens: A Photographic Journey Through Bournonville’s Ballets) / Round Tower, Copenhagen / May 13 – June 12, 2005 Housed in Copenhagen’s Round Tower, Sylfider, Trolde og Linselus: En Fotografisk Rejse i Bournonvilles Balletter (Sylphides and Trolls Caught in the […]