For those who still don’t know or might be reading this sometime in the future and have forgotten, 2006 is Mozart Year in Austria. We’ve been deluged with dance performances centered around Wolfgang Amadeus’s music since the New Year, starting with the Christmas concert at TanzQuartier Wien and following through with Tanz Company Gervasi and others. What we saw tonight at ImPulsTanz may be the last round. And it’s a good thing. For some reason, dancers and even more so, choreographers have a lot of difficulty dancing to Mozart. This surprises me as Mozart has always been famous for his…
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ImPulstTanz 2006 is fantastic. The limited coverage you see here has nothing to do with the programme. I’ve missed wonderful things, like the opening night with Anna Teresa de Keersmaekerr which I have from reliable sources as unbelievably wonderful. My apologies for the limited ImPulsTanz coverage this year. My commercial business is growing by leaps and bounds. We have new employees and new offices and new clients and there is only one of me. I’ve also spent a lot of my discretionary time in the last few months more or less successfully learning German. Finally truly learning that the only…
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At the end of the Christa Ludwig’s talk, Vienn State Opera principal dancer Simona Noja danced a short solo a five minute excerpt from Maria Callus’s famous performance of Violetta (Verdi’s La Traviata)…. I shot vertically as I find the horizontal frame of a television extremely unattractive for a dance solo, particularly in a room like the Eroica Sall in the Austrian Theatre Museum.
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I shot vertically as I find the horizontal frame of a television extremely unattractive for a dance solo, particularly in a room like the Eroica Sall in the Austrian Theatre Museum…. For more pictures of Simona Noja as Maria Callas, please visit my friend photographer Anton Hoellersberger who took some wonderful photographs during the filming.
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Aware of his audience – in large part families with children – Toulon shifts the focus from the grands pas of the fairies into some kind of excursion into a Disney-like world of fairytales…. It makes a nice allusion to the end of Charles Perrault’s and Battista’s original versions of the Sleeping Beauty story (dropped in the Brother Grimm’s Dörnroschen, the Petipa Sleeping Beauty and in the Disney film – which appears to be based closely on the Petipa ballet in turn based on the first half of Perrault.
3 CommentsI haven’t been able to find a definitive version of the original Maurius Petipa and Ivan Vsevolozhsky libretto to which Pyotr Tschaikowsky composed the original score. Here is Marinsky Theatre Director’s Vsevolozhsky’s comment on the origins of the ballet: I conceived the idea of writing a libretto on La Belle au bois dormant after Perrault’s tale. I want to do the mise-en-scène in the style of Louis XIV. Here the musical imagination can be carried away, and melodies composed in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc., etc. In the last act indispensably necessary is a quadrille of all of…
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THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS
Charles Perrault
Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, who were very sorry that they had no children,—so sorry that it cannot be told.
At last, however, the Queen had a daughter. There was a very fine christening; and the Princess had for her godmothers all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom (there were seven of them), so that every one of them might confer a gift upon her, as was the custom of fairies in those days. By this means the Princess had all the perfections imaginable.
1 CommentSUN, MOON, AND TALIA
Fifth Diversion of the Fifth Day
There once lived a great lord who was blessed with the birth of a beautiful infant daughter, whom he named Talia. The lord sent for wise men and astrologers to foretell what fate had in store for his daughter, and after they had consulted together and cast her horoscope, they told the lord that Talia would be put in great danger by a splinter of flax. The lord then decreed that no flax or hemp, or anything of the kind, should be brought into the house; he thought that by doing so he could protect his daughter from her fate.
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