Oops! Guess who forgot to do the papers today and remembered during the matinee of Schéhérazade:
Kirov Ballet triple bill By Luke Jennings for The Guardian
The opening night of the Kirov Ballet's Homage to Diaghilev programme, while promising much, proved a surprisingly muted affair. The evening opened with Chopiniana, Mikhail Fokine's moonlit reverie. Known in the west as Les Sylphides, the ballet has a delicate ethereality that is intended to evoke the Romantic ballets of the 1830s and 40s. An early fall by one of the principals, however, appeared to unnerve the ensemble. Thereafter, although all the dancers were moving and breathing as one, tension and caution were evident at all levels. Only Irina Golub seemed unaffected; she danced the Prelude with beguiling, unhindered lightness.....
....[re. Schéhérazade]Zakharova departs the Kirov shortly for the Bolshoi, leaving a vacancy in the snake-hipped enchantress department. She will be missed.
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Diaghilev Triple Bill/ Kirov Ballet
By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times
I take it as a happy portent that the Kirov Ballet is reclaiming the old Ballets Russes repertory. A few Diaghilev works originated on the Mariinsky stage: the impeccableChopiniana a prime example. Others, such as the company's awful Petrushka, were Soviet-era misapprehensions. But re-identifying Fokine, Nijinsky, Nijinska and - most significant - Balanchine as Petersburg creatures (all educated on its blessed stage) is worthwhile.
Petersburg roots, Mariinsky attitudes, are there as grain of the artist, if not always the output. So, fascination at the Kirov triple bill on Monday night, which brought the first London showing of the troupe's newest acquisition, Nijinska's Les Noces, framed by an ancestral treasure, Chopiniana, flawlessly done, and by that bedizened old ghost Sche{'}he{'}razade.
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Hokum in the harem Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Homage to Diaghilev.
What Serge Diaghilev represents to the Western ballet world is everything that revitalised a dying performing art, gave it a hundred years' new life and a multitude of new colours. European and American dancers know this deep in their soul. What he represents to his original company is harder to tell.
The Soviets considered his Ballets Russes renegades and obliterated them from dance studies for 70-odd years. Paying homage to him now, the Kirov are galloping to catch up with his modernist revolution, next week performing a dubious version of Nijinsky's legendary 1913 The Rite of Spring, this week his sister's equally extraordinary 1923 Les Noces.
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Hitched at last: the Kirov’s proletarian wedding By Debra Craine for The Times
ONE of the most exciting developments at the Kirov Ballet over the past decade has been the company’s acquisition of some of the Diaghilev ballets, works made by Russians choreographing abroad in the heady atmosphere of Paris in the early 20th century. People like Mikhail Fokine and Bronislava Nijinska, who began their careers at the Kirov’s home theatre in St Petersburg and ended up — like so many Russian exiles — in America. Their ballets make up the Kirov’s current triple bill at the Royal Opera House, billed as a Homage to Diaghilev.
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