Slipper or cake?

Despite the lovely weather, winter has started to make itself felt in London - slightly sparkly roofs this morning, and the single-figure night-time temperatures mean that the central heating is now on all the time. To add insult to injury, we have acquired new upstairs neighbours... who have small children! It's only been one day of the incessant running up-and-down across our ceiling, but I am already wound up to the "Nth degree". If it keeps up, we may have to start planning to move. Oh dear.

Never mind, eh? With another lovely and - ahem - rewarding week in work to come, we are definitely in need of some cheering up. What better distraction on this Tacky Music Monday than Miss Leslie Caron and Mr Michael Wilding camping it up performing a lovely bit of ballet, in this glittering scene from The Glass Slipper?

Palace Kitchen Ballet scene from The Glass Slipper (1955)

Have a good week, folks!

A cuddle by the fire, Spanish-style

Feeling a little chilly today? Here's a little something that should warm you up...

On this, the 140th anniversary of the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, here's a magnificent interpretation from his ballet El Amor Brujo ("Bewitched love") of the classic Ritual Fire Dance!

With choreography by Carlos Saura and Antonio Gades (who is also the male lead dancer, opposite the sublime Cristina Hoyos), plus the unsurpassable vocals of our great Patron Saint of Histrionics Señorita Rocio Jurado, what better way to take one's mind off Winter?

Manuel de Falla - El Amor Brujo: Danza Ritual del Fuego & Canción del Fuego Fatuo

Roll on our trip to Spain in February, I say!!

Manuel de Falla y Matheu (23rd November 1876 – 14th November 1946)

Totty of the Day

Yes, please!







Nine years ago [yes - this blog has been going that long...] I described my then-new discovery, the ballet dancer Señor Carlos Acosta, as a "Cuban Sex God".

Now he has announced his retirement from the stage, with a gala performance at the Royal Albert Hall next week, my feelings have changed very little.

He's a fine hunk'o'man and, to paraphrase Miss Christie (as delivered by Dame Maggie), "always could get his legs higher and wider than anyone else"!

Here's a little evidence...

Carlos Acosta - Don Quixote

Carlos Acosta - Le Corsaire

I'm exhausted, now!

Carlos Acosta website

You have dancing shoes with nimble soles

"Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance."

"Not I, believe me. You have dancing shoes
With nimble soles. I have a soul of lead
So stakes me to the ground I cannot move."

"You are a lover. Borrow Cupid’s wings
And soar with them above a common bound."

On this day of all things Shakespearean*, it is a felicitous coincidence indeed that also born on this day was the composer Sergei Prokofiev.

For it was Prokofiev who took inspiration from Will's greatest romantic play Romeo and Juliet to create one of the best ballet scores of the 20th century.

From it comes one of my favourite pieces of classical music, the dramatic and triumphal Dance of the Knights - also known as Montagues and Capulets - here played in its entirety by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev:

London Symphony Orchestra - Dance of the Knights [Prokofiev: Romeo & Juliet]

And if that didn't wake you up, nothing will!

Sergei Prokofiev (23rd April 1891 - 5th March 1953)

[*'tis 400 years since the Bard's death, and traditionally also the date usually marked as his birthday.]

Shakespeare and his boys are the latest "exhibit" in the Dolores Delargo Towers Museum of Camp.

Swan Song

RIP Jonathan Ollivier (1977 - 9th August 2015), principal dancer in Matthew Bourne's ballet company, who sadly died in a road accident hours before his final appearance as "The Swan" in Swan Lake.

Debussy to a Disco beat

What can I say about the new Pet Shop Boys ballet, other than its title is so appropriate?!

For The Most Incredible Thing was exactly that! Incredible!

With its utterly stunning visuals, superbly orchestrated music from the Boys, and exhaustingly brilliant choreography by Javier De Frutos, this was a sensory and emotional feast.

Based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, the story is set in a mystical kingdom where the (brilliantly synchronised) workers work and the royals don't, where revolution is never far away, and the King (Michael Camp) has plans to make his people happy. He announces a contest, the prize being half his kingdom and his daughter's hand in marriage, for anyone who can present him with the eponymous "Most Incredible Thing".

We are treated to the back-story (in dance) of the relationships between the bored Princess (Clemmie Sveaas), the ambitious inventor Leo (Aaron Sillis), and the villainous military leader Karl (Ivan Putrov) as the competition gets underway. The contest is (hilariously) staged as a sort of "Mystical Kingdom's Got Talent"-type show, with a succession of typically inept entrants. Until, that is, our hero Leo presents his little invention (built with the assistance of three Muses, en point of course, who perform a beautiful "pas de quatre" with him, if such a thing exists) - a pocket watch. Not much of an "incredible thing" one might think...



However, in the second part (this ballet, unusually, has three sections and two intervals), the true nature of Leo's creation is revealed in a series of increasingly spectacular choreographed fantasy scenes - one for every hour on the clock. Where the opening segment was beautiful and funny in turn, this sequence was just breath-taking! Sr De Frutos pays homage to fellow dance maestros Fosse, Ashton and even Busby Berkeley(!), and lets his imagination run riot. To accompany this brilliance, the visual spectacle goes into overdrive, and Mr Tennant and Mr Lowe's music shows its true breadth and variety. I was exhausted!

Of course, true to all fairy tales, the villain has to have his moment, and Karl's comes right at the close of the fantasy sequence when he brutally crushes and destroys the watch, claiming this instead to be "The Most Incredible Thing" and usurping the prize. So close was this to pantomime, we almost hissed and booed...

So we witness the unhappy preparations for the nuptials between the Princess and the villain - cleverly staged all in black and white - and poor Leo languishing in jail. But all is not lost (of course), as to the rescue come the Muses, and the rebuilt clock miraculously swallows up the malevolent Karl, freeing the Princess and Leo to renew their love. Their joy is encapsulated in a (rather clumsy I thought) duet, but this is immediately followed by the ensemble number (that returns us cleverly to the synchronicity of the opening "workers" number) at their wedding feast. So all is right once more.

And, in the end "the most incredible thing is: no-one is jealous"!

Bloody magnificent, and thanks to our friend Paul who managed to get me, John-John and Julie tickets for this now sold-out event! This was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience I will never forget.

The Most Incredible Thing music preview:



Sadlers Wells trailer:

Pet Shop Boys & Javier De Frutos - The Most Incredible Thing

The Most Incredible Thing is at Sadlers Wells until 26th March 2011.

Prima Ballerina Assoluta

"Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike."

Dame Margot Fonteyn left this world (far too early) twenty years ago today.

Hers was a glittering career - famously she was due to retire in the early 1960s after more than two decades as the top ballerina of her generation under the tutelage of Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Ninette de Valois, having been most acclaimed for her artistic partnership with Robert Helpmann.

Then, out of the blue, the Russian megastar Rudolf Nureyev defected (read more about him in my blog of three years ago), and that partnership (despite the eighteen-year gap between their ages) kept her at the peak of balletic excellence for almost twenty more years!



Her sad decline (she died of cancer in almost primitive surroundings in Panama, caring for her paraplegic husband) - and his (of AIDS) - has been well-documented, not least in that brilliant BBC biographical drama Margot in 2009.

So let us instead wallow in the brilliance of their partnership in the sublime Swan Lake...

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev - Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky)

Margot Fonteyn biography on Britannica Online

Oh What a Wow - He's the Greatest Dancer

"A male dancer like this, with such sensuality, ability and charisma, had not been seen before.....not even Nijinsky had the impact Nureyev had on dance. To see him stand on stage was a revelation."

One of the most beautiful men to have ever lived, Rudolf Nureyev would have been seventy years old this week.

Rudolf was a sensation - as flamboyant, haughty and dramatic off stage as he was on it. His defection from Russia in the height of the Cold War was a bolt from the blue for the art world. But it was his flawless, emotional and graceful performances that projected him to super-stardom, and he was lauded as the best classical ballet dancer of the twentieth century.

And he was just soooo sexy...

Lord Snowdon recalls meeting Rudy for a photoshoot:

I said "Tell Mr Nureyev to take that handkerchief out of his pocket, it looks ridiculous." And Rudolf said, "That is no hanky, that is my cock!"

Nureyev - The Russian Years

Nureyev and Miss Piggy in the sauna (The Muppet Show)

Rudolf Nureyev - The Life

Cuban sex god

Wow!

Just watched a repeat of the BBC's Culture Show, and I was about to switch off having had just about enough of the tiresome girl presenter with her comedy Northern accent, when she introduced a feature on the new star of the ballet world Carlos Acosta. And I fell immediately in lust.



Style, grace, power, and a magnificent pair of buns!

Acosta, described on the Sadlers Wells website as "the greatest ballet dancer of his generation", is a national hero in his homeland of Cuba. He is also notable as one of the first black dancers to reach the dizzy heights of principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, and will headline the new five-week spring dance season starting next year at the London Coliseum, as a collaboration between Sadlers Wells and impresario Raymond Gubbay.

I think I might just book a ticket (and take my opera glasses for a close-up of that perfect tush...)