In 1874, the great Danish choreographer August Bournonville traveled to St. Petersburg, where, as he tells us in his memoirs, “I saw in turn Le Papillon, La Fille du Pharaon, Don Quixote, Esmeralda, and Le Roi Candaule …. I did justice to the richly imaginative arrangement of the settings and transformations as well as the Read More
It’s easy-and fun-to drop in on the Kirov Ballet these days: interesting productions, first-rate dancers, and the fascination of watching a major ballet company reinvent itself. It’s hard, though, to figure out exactly what the company is, because what we get to see is only a modest part of its repertory, and so many of Read More
The Kirov-the world’s premier dance company, the company of
Petipa and Fokine, of Nijinsky and Pavlova, of Balanchine and Danilova and
Spessivtseva, of Nureyev and Makarova and Baryshnikov-is finally lurching into
the 20th century (forget the 21st). Having missed modernism and postmodernism,
and with the West now available both as inspiration and cash cow, it’s Read More
