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Stella Abrera and Alexandre Hammoudi will join Tyler Angle and Teresa Reichlen in the cast for Emery LeCrone's classically-based ballet to Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C Minor that will be presented on March 23rd and March 24th as part of the Guggenheim's Works & Process Spring 2014 season.

Vassily Primikov will perform the music. Costumes will be designed by Yigal Azrouël.

Emery will also present a second dance utilizing the exact same music but the choreography will be more contemporary in nature. It will feature Sarah Atkins, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Pierre Guilbault, Richard Isaac, Kimi Nikaidoh, and Alfredo Solivan.

General ticket sales begin on Januray 15th although priority ticketing for Guggenheim W&P members is in full swing through January 14th. Haglund will post the livestream plans if and when they become available.

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Just want to remind everybody that Cincinnati Ballet comes to the Joyce Theater May 6-11. The program includes Hummingbird in a Box which is set to seven brand new songs by Peter Frampton. Hummingbird was part of a full evening of choreography set to Frampton's tunes for which he and his band played live on stage last April in Cincy.

The Joyce stage is smaller than the one at the Aronoff Center where the Cincinnati Ballet premiere took place, so you might not think that there is much of a chance that Frampton will show up for the NYC gig. But this is freakin' New York, ya know, where freakin' anything can happen. And it would be just like freakin' Frampton and his freakin' sometime bass player, Willem Dafoe, to show up on stage for a gig for one or more of those Joyce dates. Don't be freakin' sorry you didn't get tickets.

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Also, don't forget to get your tickets to Royal New Zealand Ballet's debut at the Joyce Theater February 12-16th. We're getting their rep program while lucky L.A. gets the new Giselle production with Gillian Murphy making her U.S. debut in the title role. By the way, Gillian and Cory Stearns will be dancing the leads in Giselle with the Festival Ballet Theatre at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on March 22nd and 23rd.

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The Primorsky State Opera and Ballet Theatre is presenting a series of performances entitled "Bridges of Culture: St. Petersburg to Vladivostok" for which artists from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and that side of Russia are being featured in a variety of cultural works in the brand new theater in Vladivostok which is way over on the other side of Russia.

The special dance evening on January 19th will feature a one-act premiere by Artistic Director Aidar Akhmetov set to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 which incorporates poems by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The featured soloist will be Inna Ginkevich, former ballerina of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre.

By the way, Joseph Phillips' star continues to shine in Vladivostok.  Here he is executing the Grigorovich Lift in a recent performance:

And here he is in what appears to be Walpurgis Night:

 

So much of the rest of the world knows exactly what to do with ABT's talent.  Why doesn't Kevin McKenzie?

 

Comments

[friedrich]

Haglund,

Do you remember the passage in D`Amboises`memoirs about the comment Balanchine made about that lift in Crankos` "Onegin" ? .....Priceless . That said , I do enjoy "Spring Waters"....which is thankfully short.
And another guilty pleasure is the old Bolshoi "Walpurgisnacht"....has it been revived ? Lets see...Ivan Vasiliev as the lead satyr....the perfect role for him !
It would be nice to see him in all that Soviet era camp...how else can one bear to see that ungainly body on the ballet stage ?

Regards,

friedrich

[Haglund]

Friedrich, I'll take Balanchine's pokes at rival Cranko's Onegin with a grain of salt. As with most Balanchine sayings, one never knows these days whether they are accurate or not, or the true context in which they were made. Hearsay is hearsay wherever it's offered.

I absolutely love Cranko's Onegin, lifts and all - that is, when E.O. is strong enough to make them look effortless. I understand that the Moscow audiences loved the production last year regardless of what the literary purists thought of it.

The Primorsky's Walpurgis is likely from the old Bolshoi version since the AD was a Bolshoi dancer, but I don't know the last time the ballet was revived in Moscow.

[friedrich]

Haglund,

I do not think that Balanchine and Cranko were "rivals". I would not place Cranko on the level of Balanchine and Ashton. That said , I do enjoy many of his ballets , especially "Eugene Onegin" As to the literary purists - one cannot compare verse novels such as OE to a ballet version. How many US-Americans have read it in the original - or in Vladimir Nabokovs`translation ? I saw the ballet in Stuttgart with Alicia Armatriain , Evan McKie and Friedeman Vogel. The Stuttgart performance was superior to that of the Bolshoi - long excerpts of which can be seen onYoutube. It is unfortunate that we do not see such dancers as McKie , Armatriain, and Vogel dancing these roles with ABT....Stearns certainly looks the part...but his dancing was pallid compared to McKie....It is interesting the Neumeier is working on his own version - titled "Onegin" -even though his own company dances the Cranko quite well.....

[Haglund]

The clips of Alicia Amatriain and Evan McKie are pretty powerful stuff. They really transport you into their world to the point where you're not really paying attention to the dancing - it's their story.