Royal Ballet: Sweet Violets/Serenade/ DGV review – from ecstasy to agony.
Royal Opera House, London.
Joy is hard to sustain when fate is fickle and Jack the Ripper is waiting in the wings in the Royal Ballet's triple bill.
Luke Jennings
The Observer, Sunday 18 May 2014
Easy does it: Marianela Nuñez, centre, in the Royal Ballet’s Serenade. Photograph: Tristram Kenton.
Serenade was first performed in 1934 at White Plains, New York by students of the fledgling School of American Ballet. It was George Balanchine's first work with American dancers, and as well as being one of the best loved of his ballets, is a work of resonant significance. It represents the moment at which the choreographer's Russian heritage – the lost world of the great imperial ballet theatres – found shimmering new expression in the west. The curtain rises on 17 young women standing in diagonal lines, illuminated by moonlight. They are costumed in long, pale blue ballet skirts, with their right arms raised. As one, to the opening bars of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major, they execute a formal port de bras. It's as if they're taking the past into themselves, even as they embody the future.
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/may/18/serenade-sweet-violets-dgv-royal-ballet-review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBtzyRzk0UM
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