Review: American Ballet Theatre Studio Company opens the Next Generation Festival 2025
Jonathan Gray sees American Ballet Theatre Studio Company in a “disappointing” mixed programme at The Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre.
Black Swan
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Interview: Elizaveta Kokoreva, the Bolshoi Ballet’s youngest star, comes to Rome
Elizaveta Kokoreva makes her debut in the West when she dances in the Les Étoiles galas in Rome on 4 and 5 January.
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Review: Circa’s Duck Pond – the place in which The Ugly Duckling and Swan Lake collide
Graham Watts sees Circa’s Duck Pond – “although balancing was largely the name of the game, ironically the balance between circus and theatre needed a little more refinement”.
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Review: Les Étoiles gala in Milan – 21 dancers, 17 pieces, 3 hours of starry dance
Graham Spicer sees the Les Étoiles galas in Milan with ballet stars in thrilling pas de deux and seductive modern repertoire.
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Photo album: Gala Les Étoiles at Ravenna Festival with international ballet stars
Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand (Paris Opera Ballet), Jacopo Tissi and Alena Kovaleva (Bolshoi Ballet), Bakhtiyar Adamzhan (Astana Opera, Kazakhstan), Tatiana Melnik (Hungarian National Ballet), Constantine Allen, Anna Tsygankova, Young Gyu Choi and Rebecca Storani (Dutch National Ballet), Sergio Bernal (Spanish National Ballet) Daniele Cipriani’s galas, Les Étoiles, have become staples of the ballet stars’ calendar with top names participating from Russia,…
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Derek Deane on 20 years of his Swan Lake ‘in the round’
Swan Lake ‘in the round’ has been performed for 7 seasons at the Royal Albert Hall since its conception in 1997, so this year marks its 20th anniversary. It has also been seen in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide to record breaking attendances for ballet in Australia. In all, Derek Deane‘s Swan Lake has been…
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Svetlana Zakharova: When they cut my costume in half
Svetlana Zakharova knows that a lot of jealousy surrounds her but she’s fought for her rightful position in the dance world since she was a child: It was a tough struggle at the Vaganova Academy. I was ten, and several times I just wanted to leave everything to return home to my family. This does not…
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Maria Riccetto answers the Gramilano Questionnaire… Dancers’ Edition
Q&A When did you start dancing? When I was 6. Why did you start dancing? My mother thought it would be great for me, and my parents needed to find something for me to do after school. Which dancer inspired you most as a child? I remember watching Cynthia Harvey and Misha’s Don Q a…
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Natalia Osipova and Claudio Coviello début in Nureyev’s Swan Lake
Prince Siegfried sleeps on his throne and in his dream he sees the evil Rothbart carrying off a white swan into the sky. This is how Rudolf Nureyev‘s version of Swan Lake begins, and ends. The ballet seen as a Freudian nightmare, the young prince who finds escape in his head instead of taking up the…
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Critics round-up: Peter Schaufuss’ Tchaikovsky Trilogy
This promises to be the most fun critics round-up yet. Rarely have reviews been so unanimously foul. Being that there was so little to save, the critics left their stars in the drawer, and polished their metaphors with seeming glee. No amount of special pleading, of aesthetic jiggery-pokery, can excuse Schaufuss’s weird libretto as it…
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Roberto Bolle: I conquered America… ABT, Black Swan and solitude
After Roberto Bolle‘s Romeo and Juliet with the American Ballet Theatre in New York, Italy‘s gossip magazine Chi sent their editor Alsonso Signorini to interview him, and photographer Fabrizio Cestari to snap the dancer in various iconic Big Apple locations. You are among the few Italians who have made it in America. Was it difficult?…
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An interview with Daniil Simkin
While American Ballet Theatre Dancer Daniil Simkin was in Taipei City in Taiwan for an international ballet gala, the Taipei Times took the opportunity to ask him a few questions: You come from a dance family, but I have heard you had a rather unconventional upbringing, in terms of schooling for a dancer. Daniil Simkin: Yes, both of my parents…
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Top 10 actors on IMDb in 2011
International Movie Database’s Top 10 Stars list this year: Natalie Portman Mila Kunis Johnny Depp Emma Stone Chris Hemsworth Olivia Wilde Jennifer Lawrence George Clooney Ryan Gosling Christian Bale Why Portman? “You can see why,” says IMDb managing editor Keith Simanton. “She won a Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan, was in the news welcoming…
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Ken Russell dies at 84
Ken Russell, the British director of “Women in Love” and “The Devils”, has died at the age of 84. In a statement his wife said, It was completely unexpected. He had recently agreed to direct the feature film Alice In Wonderland The Musical and he was working on the script and casting of that.” Russell began his directing…
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Royal Ballet’s Deborah Bull talks to The Times
Deborah Bull‘s book The Everyday Dancer (published by Faber and Faber,£14.99) is in the shops. An essential read for those in the ballet world, and interesting for those close by! Bull talked to The Times in their “5 minutes with…” series. Here is an extract: On ambition Like a lot of women I’ve shied away from that word….
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Mikhail Baryshnikov on boycotts, ballet, ‘Black Swan’, Studio 54, ‘Sex and the City’, contemporary dance and being a sex symbol
As “In Paris” arrives in Tel Aviv for nine performances, Mikhail Baryshnikov talked to Elad Samorzik of Haaretz: On age and repertoire “Listen, I am 63 years-old. It depends what you’re dancing. The piece we did with Anna Laguna we played ourselves, our age. We are not dancing ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ You know, pas de deux….
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The Royal Ballet’s Deborah Bull: ‘ There is no reason for any of us to be missing lunch’
On the publication of Deborah Bull‘s new book The Everyday Dancer she talked to The Observer’s Kate Kellaway. Here are some of her words: On family It was a singing and dancing family… My mum was the principal boy and dad was the dame in all the pantomimes.” On ambition It was never: I want to be…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, Swan Lake
The Mariinsky kicked off their 3-week stay at the Royal Opera House with Swan Lake. An obvious, and right, choice, Immutable is the Mariinsky’s root foundation in classical tradition. Everything they dance speaks of “schooling”. Whatever more modern works the repertory now embraces, the classic ballets provide the company’s signature — none more so in…
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The ‘other’ Italian dancing star: Giuseppe Picone talks about anorexia, lunch with Diana, and the cut-throat world of American ballet
The ‘other’ Italian dancing star is Giuseppe Picone. For many Italians, especially the ones who rarely go to the theatre, Roberto Bolle is the only ballerino in the world worth watching. Many buy tickets only because Bolle is in the cast, and their evening is ruined if he doesn’t take his shirt off at some point (an…
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Critics’ Roundup: the Mariinsky in London, Swan Lake
In a splattering of mainly four and five-star reviews it was, perhaps surprisingly, the Financial Times‘s Clement Crisp, maybe the hardest critic to please, who showered compliments over the company without restraint: The world’s stages are littered with productions of Swan Lake, the majority of which – as I know to my cost – are horrid and foolishly…
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Roberto Bolle on why Natalie Portman should give back her Oscar… and more
Questions and answers with Roberto Bolle including whether he thinks Natalie Portman deserves her Oscar for the film Black Swan, and the most beautiful woman and man in the world.
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ABT’s Swan Lake: the unemotional performances meant there probably wasn’t a damp eye in the house
“Unemotional”, “expressive limitations”, “without real excitement”, not a good start to the American Ballet Theatre‘s current run of Swan Lake. The production maybe doesn’t help the principals, as Alistair Macaulay points out, “unless you think that 32 fouetté turns are what ballet is all about, this production really doesn’t showcase the greatest features of Swan Lake.” While certain…
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Matthew Bourne: “a lot of young people think that it’s odd to have women as swans”
Matthew Bourne‘s Swan Lake will be shown on television 3-D. Ahead of its showing The Times talked to the choreographer. Here are some of the questions he was asked: Where would you be without Swan Lake? It’s the thing that opened up everything else to me. The irony is that this is the only version…
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Natalie Portman’s personal ballet trainer sees business boom by 5,000%
Three years ago, the New York City Ballet dancer and owner of fitness company Ballet Beautiful got a chance to train Natalie Portman for her role in the film ”Black Swan.” The association with Portman, said Bowers, expanded her market exponentially. Publicity surrounding the training convinced non-dancers that Bowers’ fitness regimen could work for them. “People from…
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Tamara Rojo interview: “I start from zero – I go back to the steps to find all the feelings again”
Five minutes in the company of Tamara Rojo and you don’t just want to interview her: you want her to be your best friend. Funny, clever, phenomenally articulate, she responds to each question with excitement, wit, fury and intelligence – and so begins The Telegraph‘s long interview with the Royal Ballet star. Rojo on returning to…
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Sarah Lane’s back, this time on ABC, talking about being Natalie Portman’s ‘Black Swan’ Dance Double
In her first television interview on ABC’s “20/20’s” with Elizabeth Vargas, Sarah Lane, the ballerina who was Natalie Portman‘s dance double in “Black Swan,” accused film-makers of lying about how much she danced in the film, and trying to cover it up. I’m not speaking because I feel I should be heralded, I’m just speaking because they’re completely lying…
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José Manuel Carreño and the Feijoo sisters on Dancing with the Stars
As part of Classical Week on America’s Dancing With The Stars, the season’s first “Macy’s Stars of Dance” performance featured three of the most famous ballet dancers in America today, though all three are Cuban. They danced a specially choreographed segment from “Swan Lake.” Lorena and Lorna Feijoo, principles for the San Francisco Ballet and…
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The Guardian says: vote for ballet… online
The question that the newspaper is asking is: “A row has erupted over whether Natalie Portman danced most of her ballet scenes in Black Swan. Does it matter whether it was her or ‘ballet double’ Sarah Lane?” Go here to vote.
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Darren Aronofsky defends Natalie Portman in ‘Black Swan’ controversy
Responding to claims that Black Swan star Natalie Portman didn’t do the majority of her on-screen dancing in her Oscar-winning role, director Darren Aronofsky released the following statement through studio Fox Searchlight: “Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched….
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‘Black Swan’ controversy: ‘Natalie herself did most of the dancing,’ insist filmmakers. Her double disagrees.
A claim by Natalie Portman‘s ballet double from the movie Black Swan alleging that the Oscar-winning actress did not perform the majority of that film’s dance sequences has quickly been challenged. Sarah Lane, the American Ballet Theatre soloist who doubled for Portman during some of that film’s most difficult dance sequences, told Entertainment Weekly that…
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