Summer Dance
Season 1
No season overview available.
George Balanchine
To open this season, a portrait of George Balanchine , who died ten years ago. New York City Ballet, the company he founded, performs Serenade, danced to Tchaikovsky's Serenade for string orchestra, and Western Symphony, his tribute to the wild west.
Christopher Bruce
Ghost Dances and Journey British-born choreographer Christopher Bruce has an international reputation and is in demand by companies from all over the world. Next year, he becomes the artistic director of Britain's Rambert Dance Company. Tonight, the Houston Ballet performs Journey, which he created especially for them as a tribute to the great Danish ballet dancer Erik Bruhn. Also featured is a work he created for the Rambert company, Ghost Dances. This is one of his most popular and powerful ballets, set to South American folk music and reflecting on the political struggles of Chile.
Mats Ek
Tonight, another chance to see Swedish choreographer Mats Ek's production of Giselle. Though keeping the familiar Adolphe Adam music of the 19th-century ballet, Ek has discarded the usual setting in a romantic Rhineland village with dead spirits in a woodland glade. In his version, Giselle is confined to an asylum when she discovers that the stranger courting her is engaged to a woman from his own class. At the centre of the production is Anna Laguna 's award-winning performance as Giselle.
Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor is one of the greats of American contemporary dance and in tonight's programme his company performs Speaking in Tongues, called by The New York Times "a masterpiece for our time". It has been reworked by Taylor for the small screen. It is a dark work set in a small American town that is dominated by a "man of the cloth" who searches out sin and bestows punishment and redemption.
Hans van Manen & Maguy Marin
Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen takes the mood of this ballet from its music, Alban Berg 's Violin Concerto, written as an elegy for Manon Gropius who died tragically young. Groosland. Another chance to see the performance first shown in 1991 of Groosland(Fatlands), French choreographer Maguy Marin's all-dancing, all-bouncing celebration of being overweight, performed to the music of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.
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