Ballets Russes
English National Ballet, Sadler’s Wells
I think Diaghilev would have been thrilled to attend the opening night of English National Ballet’s centenary celebrations of his Ballets Russes. Not unlike his famously orchestrated 1909 dress rehearsal at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris, ENB’s performance was attended by a glamorous array of stars, celebrities and former glories, complete with paparazzi at the entrance.
Luckily, the buzz was not just on one side of the curtain, as the first of the two Ballets Russes celebration programmes was also glamorous and generally well performed. Thanks to an intelligent approach, none of the ‘old’ items reeked of mothballs; not even the hyper-camp, though enjoyable, Schéhérazade, which concluded the evening on a fizzy note with its pseudo-orientalist overtones, tamed eroticism and flashy pyrotechnics.
The modernist take on Diaghilev’s repertoire became evident as soon as the curtain went up on Apollo, presented here in Balanchine’s own ‘edited’ 1970s revisitation of the 1928 original Apollon Musagète.
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