Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
Musings of a former ballet dancer who’s returned, years later, to the studio as a student.
Marius Petipa’s 1898 classic, Raymonda, has long been due for a reboot. Set during the Crusades, it features a courtly knight and his betrothed, the helpless but beautiful Raymonda. In this current Bolshoi staging, the gallant Jean de Brienne heads off to fight the infidels, leaving Raymonda to fend for herself (or not) against a … Read more
In 2004, San Francisco Ballet’s then-Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson took a creative leap with a new production of the perennially popular Nutcracker. Stakes were high; the San Francisco Ballet was, after all, the first U.S. company to stage and produce a full-length version (based on the Ivanov/Petipa 1892 original), which premiered on Christmas Eve, 1944, there … Read more
World Ballet Day 2024 is … … Sadly, not going to happen. Following is news from the official World Ballet Day site today, September 23, 2024: After 10 fantastic years of bringing together audiences around the globe on World Ballet Day, The Australian Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet have decided to … Read more
I wrote my first post on this in 2013, mere months after I’d started my blog. I didn’t have a lot of posts or readers back then. I’d feel lucky to get twenty views a day, and I’d savor that number, cheering when it rose to thirty and feeling teary when it dropped to ten … Read more
Thirty years of success as a ballet company is most decidedly something to celebrate, and this coming weekend (March 22-23) Diablo Ballet will mark this landmark anniversary with a “Stars & Stripes Jubilee” program. Lauren Jonas, the company’s longtime artistic director and cofounder, reflected that it has taken all of those thirty years to arrive … Read more