Rachel’s blog @ View Rachel @ Juilliard Dance | Published: December 17, 2013 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus VIENNA—The former Paris Opera Ballet Étoile Manuel Legris took the reigns of the Vienna Staatsballett in 2010, infusing a company that had developed a reputation for being a ballet museum with a shot of 21st-century dancing adrenalin. Legris’s modernizing hasn’t bruised his financial support: the Staatsoper budget for opera and ballet is […] Published: October 9, 2013 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Sara Mearns as Odette. Photo by Paul Kolnik. On Sept. 17, New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns entered the pantheon of great interpreters of Swan Lake. Dancing the lyrical Odette (white swan) with elegiac grace, and the sharp Odile (black swan) with erotic hauteur, Mearns almost redeemed […] Published: August 3, 2012 Category: historyBy Rachel Straus Like the history of Jacob’s Pillow, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s evolution reads like a pioneer’s tale. Becket, Massachusetts and Winnipeg, Canada are not obvious places to build internationally hailed dance institutions. Yet in 1939, Gweneth Lloyd and her former pupil Betty Farrally formed the Winnipeg Ballet Club. A few years earlier, Ted […] Published: April 21, 2011 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus NEW YORK– “Swan Lake” may be the hardest work in the classical repertoire to do well. First, the plot is perhaps the best known in the canon (undoubtedly one reason “Black Swan” has done so well at the box office). Second, any ballet company worth its salt performs it – or tries […] |