Scottish Ballet: 40th Anniversary Season
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Scottish Ballet has been frequently praised for its stylistically impeccable and theatrically superb renditions of George Balanchine’s works. It is thus more than fitting that the company’s 40th-anniversary programme kicks off with Rubies, the sparkling central section of Jewels, his acclaimed 1967 triptych.
Rubies, which is often performed on its own, highlights and encompasses the best of the Balanchinian choreographic aesthetic. Dazzling, jazzy ideas, representing the American culture that the Russian-born dance-maker wanted to embrace, develop rapidly from traces of the old classical tradition which encapsulate Balanchine’s reverence for his own past and for that balletic idiom he never refuted. Yet nostalgia is never on the menu. Classical and neoclassical ideas flash rapidly amid a firework display of swaying hips, turned-in feet and humorous citations from both vaudeville and music-hall traditions.
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