Haglund's Heel

The Dance Index Project / ENB On Demand

These lovely complimentary back issues of Dance Index arrived yesterday along with information on how to subscribe to the Dance Index and how to purchase back issues. Check out this link: https://eakinspress.com/danceindex/

 

 

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English National Ballet launched its Ballet on Demand service today. One can rent titles such as Le Corsaire and La Sylphide for three day stints from around £5-7. A new digital season is upcoming (and yet to be priced) which will include five new premieres, among them Yuri Possokhov's Senseless Kindness, which is based on Vasily Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate, about a Russian family during the Second World War, and set to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No1. This will be his first work for ENB. Haglund has enjoyed much of Possokhov's work especially RAkU and Classical Symphony.

 

 

observations 8/1

As expected, ABT ripped Irina Dvorovenko's bio and picture from the website this morning.  In a lovely turn of events, they also ripped Natalia Osipova from the website as well.  Vasiliev is still there, but it seems as though Miss This-Met-Stage-Isn't-Big-Enough-For-Me will have to be a guest artist if she performs here at all. 

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Matthew Golding will be dancing a ton of performances in Le Corsaire opposite Tamara Rojo this fall at the English National Ballet.  Not to belabor the point, but Golding, who is an in-demand dancer in Europe (Dutch National Ballet, Mariinsky, Royal Ballet, and now English National Ballet) was viewed by McKenzie as only ABT corps material.

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Here is a photo by Ari Dunski of Maria Riccetto and Ciro Tamayo rehearsing the White Swan PdD at Ballet Nacional del Sodre in Uruguay.  They debut in one week:

Collateral damage

Troubling news in the ballet world:  Wayne Eagling, Artistic Director of the English National Ballet, is leaving his post effective in August.  

Follow the sequence of events:

• ABT's Kevin McKenzie armed with his Koch money goes poaching after Eagling's star principal, Vadim Muntagirov and the Royal Ballet's principal Sergei Polunin. 
  
  
• Polunin can't get a release from the RB to guest at ABT so he has a meltdown and quits the Royal Ballet, loses his permit to work in the country, and recedes into despair with a series of way-too informative comments on Twitter.  The Royal Ballet clearly expresses its hope that Polunin would return.


• Wayne Eagling offers Polunin a "lifeline" to come and train at the English National Ballet as a way of securing Polunin a visa and hopefully persuading him to dance at ENB, and most importantly, plugging the anticipated hemorrhage involving Muntagirov.


• Wayne Eagling is suddenly out as the English National Ballet's artistic director. 

Perhaps when the Royal Ballet is trying to persuade its talent to return and plug its own hemorrhage, it may not view kindly another company down the road giving the star talent negotiating points - no matter what the circumstances.  It all may have been the last straw for Wayne Eagling.

Good work, McKenzie.