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Irish Times
a day ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Deirdre McQuillan dives into Venice to see how it was built and how the unique city operates
The law of unintended consequences came to mind on a recent visit to Venice. I had gone to see the opening of the second season of Il Balletto di Venezia, the ballet company founded by Irish barrister Gerardine Connolly with her Venetian business partner Alessio Carbone, but what followed was completely unexpected. The experience made me discover what every Venetian knows, that the city is an upside down forest. The event took place in the grand hall of the magnificent 16th century Scuola Grande renowned for its extensive collection of masterpieces by Tintoretto adorning the walls and ceilings which took 25 to complete. It was an awesome location for the debut featuring twelve classically trained teenage dancers from various parts of the world. The company has been travelling to Sardinia, Moncalvo, Florence and Treviso this month, closing the season in Dublin in the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) tomorrow). ( After dinner and still wallowing in the memory of the performances which earned a standing ovation and roars of approval from the audience, friends walked me home to an apartment near the Accademia bridge where I was staying and I got to bed around midnight. At 2.30am , I woke up unable to breathe, just couldn't get my breath however I tried and knew I needed help. READ MORE It forced me reluctantly to wake the English caretaker who, though she has lived in Venice for many years admitted she didn't have a doctor. She decided to ring the owner of the apartment, an American doctor currently living in the States who, having listened to my wheezing efforts on speakerphone, advised that an ambulance should be called. Within minutes – - a water ambulance arrived at the little jetty nearby with three paramedics bringing various pieces of equipment. They gave me Ventolin, took my temperature, blood pressure and oxygen levels, filled in a report and seeing that my condition had improved, then left. No charge. Such is how universal social health insurance works in Italy. The caretaker was duly impressed. And it made me curious about how the city functions on water and how it was built on water. The next day, still a bit groggy, I took a vaporetto to the island of San Giorgio (location of one of the recent Jeff Bezos extravaganzas) to see an exhibition of Murano glass and visited the famous church and its campanile with views across the city. Listening to its ring of nine bells and walking around its lovely seashore was reviving. The next day there was time to marvel at the famous Bellini Mother and Child masterpiece in the Friari Basilica, one of the most important monastic centres in the city before heading back to the airport. On the way out on the Alilaguna water taxi we passed the Ospedale where I saw several water ambulances like the one that had come to my assistance the night before. motoring out of the harbour. I also noticed that scattered across the lagoon are the tips of upturned wooden stakes called bricola, testimony to the city's history and construction. Following the collapse of the Roman empire, early settlers sought refuge on a lagoon with several small islands, muddy swamps with soft clay. They created one of the world's greatest feats of engineering from which grew the great city of Venice. To create stable foundations, the Venetians harvested large timber poles between 3-11 ft from the forests of Croatia and Cadore in the Veneto, drove them down up to five metres into the ground until they hit a much harder layer of clay. They then cut off the tops and wooden planks were laid on top to spread the load and on top of that Istrian stone raised the foundations above the water. Buildings could now be erected. Since wooden piles packed tightly together free of oxygen do not rot, almost all the original piles more than 1,000 years later are still holding up the city. Over centuries the wooden piles became hardened to a stone-like state and to this day remain intact. There are 14,000 tightly packed wooden poles in the foundations of the Rialto bridge alone and around 10,000 oak trees under the San Marco Basilica built in 832 AD, so there are millions of poles supporting the city. According to a local historian the hitters who hammered down the piles by hand were called battipali and to keep the rhythm going would sing ancient songs celebrating the city. With over 5 million tourists annually, Venice is of course famous for sights such as St Mark's Square, the Doge's Palace. the Clock Tower and innumerable other great buildings and works of art; but as the bricoli attest, its marvels lie both above and below the ground. After this visit I can say that both literally and metaphorically it took my breath away. Footnote: Il Balletto di Venezia stages two performances on tomorrow, July 30th, at 5pm and 8pm at the RIAM closing its second season. It will be the first time ballet has been staged in the Academy's new concert hall.
Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
London City Ballet review — a witty and wonderful programme
The resurrection of London City Ballet nearly 30 years after the company's closure was one of the success stories of 2024. Relaunched last summer by the erstwhile dancer Christopher Marney, this international touring company is clearly on a roll in its mission to honour the past while looking to the future. Momentum, the umbrella title for LCB's second programme of revivals of rarely seen dances alongside new commissions, is hearteningly apt. The tour, which I caught at the Theatre Royal in Bath, stretches into November and encompasses Birmingham, Oxford and York, two separate visits to London (at Sadler's Wells and the Royal Opera House, respectively) as well as trips to France and Spain. • Read more dance reviews, guides and interviews You couldn't ask for a better curtain-raiser than George Balanchine's Haieff Divertimento. Named after Alexei Haieff, to whose lyrical and lively music it's set, this brief 'black and white' ballet dates from 1947 and was for decades deemed to have been lost. Incredibly, this is its UK premiere. Divided into five scenes marked by the kind of courtly yet stylish quirkiness that was key to Balanchine's art, the work is an excellent company showcase. All ten dancers have a chance to shine, but none more so than the sparklingly saucy Jimin Kim, most ably partnered by Alejandro Virelles. Balanchine's beautiful bauble is followed by a pair of darker chamber ballets, each of which focuses on duets. Premiered at the Royal Ballet in 2009 and set to Liszt, Consolations and Liebestraum was an early sign of the considerable talent of the choreographer Liam Scarlett. Charting the deterioration of a relationship through the interactions of three couples, his dance possesses great emotional intelligence. The shift from playful serenity to troubled melancholy is impressively modulated, leading to a lump-in-throat finale for the guest star Alina Cojocaru and Joseph Taylor. Joseph Taylor and Alina Cojocaru performed Consolations and Liebestraum ASH Soft Shore is by Florent Melac, premier danseur at the Paris Opera Ballet. Created for two couples, one of which is same-sex, and set to Beethoven, this new work suffers a bit by its tonal similarity to the Scarlett. Overloaded with steps and movement, it sometimes seems more like a strenuously physical exercise than the deep expression of human feeling it was meant to be. It is, however, very capably danced. The bill culminates with Alexei Ratmansky's vibrant take on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Ten wonderfully deadpan dancers, Cojocaru among them, romp their way through a series of breakneck scenes that capture the music's grandeur and drive via a deft balance of drama, melodrama and humour. The digital backdrop of geometric watercolours by Kandinsky is neatly echoed in Adeline André's costumes. The overall effect is witty and, like London City Ballet itself, more than a little dazzling.★★★★☆ 105min Touring to Nov 22, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
What happened to the real Little Dancer who inspired Degas
You know her. She's one of the most famous sculptures in the world. And the only one that the French artist Edgar Degas ever exhibited in public. Although the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was denounced at the sixth impressionist exhibition of 1881 — too ugly, the critics said — she is now recognised as a groundbreaking work of modernist art. But what about the little dancer herself? Unlike the sculpture she inspired, Marie van Goethem has been lost to history. A student at the Paris Opera Ballet School, she came from a poor background. Her Belgian father was a tailor and her mother a laundress who was soon left widowed with three daughters to support. Marie earned a bit of money posing for Degas — she was one of his favourite models. But not long after that controversial exhibition, Marie, who by then was in her late teens, was fired by the Paris Opera for missing classes and being late for rehearsals. What happened to her next, no one knows. It's a mystery that has long fascinated the Broadway director and choreographer Susan Stroman. And it's why she has spent more than a decade nurturing a new musical about the life of Van Goethem. Little Dancer, with music by Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens (the team behind Ragtime), is coming to London for a single concert performance on July 27. And if Stroman has her way, at some point a full West End staging will follow. 'The story of our musical doesn't end with Marie's dismissal,' Stroman says. 'Degas chose to sculpt her rather than a beautiful ballerina because she had grit and real life in her. We see her as a bit of an artful dodger who had street smarts and talked back to him. So we wanted to believe that Marie survived. In the show we have her as an older, wiser woman who has worked, although we don't say what work she did as that didn't seem right. But she comes back to see the sculpture that changed her life. She wanted to become a famous dancer and because of it she became the most famous dancer of all.' After the artist's death, about two dozen bronze replicas of The Little Dancer were made — now scattered throughout museums around the world — but the original sculpture, a mixed-media artwork made of beeswax and adorned with cotton tutu, linen ballet slippers and a wig of human hair, is on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where Stroman's show had its premiere at the Kennedy Center in 2014. It was revived for a successful run in Seattle five years later, and was headed for New York when the pandemic struck. 'Theatres were closed for almost two years in New York and when they reopened we had other commitments,' the director says. The offer of a concert staging at Theatre Royal Drury Lane came as a lifeline. I find Stroman in a south London dance studio, rehearsing her large cast. She may be 70, but she looks so fit and energetic that she could be one of her own dancers. This is the woman who directed and choreographed The Music Man, The Producers and Young Frankenstein on Broadway, directed and choreographed a sensational staging of Crazy for You in the West End two years ago and has won five Tony awards and two Oliviers. I especially admired her innovative productions of The Scottsboro Boys and Contact, both of which had successful runs in London and New York, and her engaging full-length ballet Double Feature for New York City Ballet. Stroman sees a growing disconnect between London and New York theatre. 'Since the pandemic everything in New York is three times the cost and it's now very difficult to mount a show there. This year 14 musicals opened on Broadway and nine have closed already. One would say Broadway is broken. But here in London one can still feel creative and be nurtured in crafting a new piece. You don't have over your heads the terrible economics of New York City.' Her production of New York, New York, inspired by Martin Scorsese's 1977 film, became a victim of the new reality on Broadway when it closed in 2023 after just a few months. This year her staging of Smash, based on the American TV series set on Broadway, followed suit. 'Just because it's a financial flop doesn't mean it's an artistic flop,' Stroman says. 'Smash got the best New York Times review of all the musicals that opened this year, but the producers looked forward into September and could see no ticket sales. I can understand how that panics them. • The best shows in London and the UK to book now 'Another thing that's changed since the pandemic, along with the costs, is that people don't necessarily book that far ahead any more,' she says. 'It makes everyone nervous and really hurts the theatre. These days the shows that run are Wicked, The Lion King, Aladdin and Hamilton, of course. But for anything coming up now I think big Broadway musicals might be over.' So is it time, as the British producer Sonia Friedman says, for theatre to think smaller? 'We are being forced to make it smaller,' Stroman says, 'but I don't think that's bad. In fact anything I'm doing in the future is quite small. That seems to be the way to go.' That's certainly the mantra for Little Dancer, which has been substantially cut back for the one-off London performance. 'The original production was two hours and 20 minutes, but for the concert version it's down to one hour and 40 minutes. Yet having done that I now feel the show should be done in one act.' There will be no sets — it's a concert after all, with the orchestra on stage — but the audience will be getting all of Stroman's vibrant classical choreography. Unusually for a musical, the ensemble, who have all been recruited locally, have to sing and act while also dancing on pointe. The cast is led by the extraordinary American ballerina Tiler Peck, a star of New York City Ballet, as Young Marie, with Laura Pitt-Pulford as Adult Marie and Julian Ovenden as Degas. 'Little Dancer is about the life of a dancer and how difficult it is to be an artist,' Stroman says. 'But it's also about choices, which Marie didn't have. Poor women in her day could be prostitutes, they could be laundresses or ballerinas.' Indeed, Marie's elder sister became a prostitute, although her younger sibling did go on to become a dancer and well-respected teacher at the Paris Opera Ballet. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Even so, life in the ballet carried its own risks for impoverished young female dancers, who could be sexually exploited by the abonnés, wealthy male patrons who paid money for the privilege of their company. 'Degas painted these men in their black top hats peering in from the side of the frames of his dance canvases, almost as a warning,' Stroman says. And what did happen to that infamous sculpture of 1881? Its detractors said it had the face of a monkey and complained that Marie's pose, standing in ballet's fourth position with chin thrust forward and arms awkwardly behind her back, wasn't chocolate-box pretty. 'Degas was really heading into modernism with the Little Dancer and it made the critics crazy,' Stroman says. 'So he took it out of the exhibition and put it in his closet. It didn't come out until 40 years later, until after he died. And now it's hailed as one of the world's great sculptures.' Little Dancer is at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, Jul 27;
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In London, the National Ballet of Japan Steps Onto the World Stage
Crooked crosses poked out of the ground and moonlit, diaphanous mist swirled across the forest floor. A ghostly figure appeared above a tree, terrifying the man standing below. It was a proper horror movie-thrill moment in the National Ballet of Japan's 'Giselle,' a wonderfully atmospheric production that opened at the Royal Opera House in London on Thursday to an audience that seemed delighted by the superb dancing of a company rarely seen outside Japan. The five-show run here (through Sunday) is a European debut for the National Ballet of Japan, and a homecoming for its director, Miyako Yoshida, who spent nearly three decades in England as a principal dancer with both the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet. In an interview, Yoshida said bringing the company to London was like saying thank you 'to the amazing directors who taught me to dance, to act, how to express my feelings onstage.' 'Giselle,' she added, 'the role where I first learned all this, is the history of my ballet life in England.' The stakes are high for Yoshida, who has directed the National Ballet since 2020. (Founded in 1997, the company is based at the New National Theater in Tokyo.) 'This is our first real tour as a company,' she said, 'in front of a sophisticated international audience, and the people who knew me as a dancer.' She paused. 'Scary!' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Who needs the Russians when the Japanese can dance like this?
Three years ago, not long after Russia (re-)invaded Ukraine, I wrote: 'The effective home arrest of Russia's (often touring) Big Two' dance companies – ie the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky – 'has now left a fascinating power vacuum on the international stage, not least in Covent Garden's summer schedules. Who will fill it?' The root cause is miserably ongoing, of course, and yet we do have three very definite answers to date. In 2023, the Australian Ballet visited the Royal Opera House for the first time in 35 years; last August, a few streets away at the Coliseum, the State Ballet of Georgia made its charming UK debut. Now, at Covent Garden, the National Ballet of Japan is here for the very first time. And you know what? They may well be the pick of the visitors so far. The company's Giselle is a complete and particularly beautiful success. On one hand, this perhaps shouldn't come as a complete surprise: western classical ballet has existed in Japan for at least a century, and a great many Japanese-born dancers go on to have illustrious careers in the West. But fair's fair: given that this troupe was founded as recently as 1997, the polish, professionalism and assurance of the production and performance alike are astonishing. So, what is this Giselle actually like? In the extensive programme notes, Miyako Yoshida – a Royal Ballet star from 1995-2010, NBJ's director since 2020, and the show's producer – says: 'I felt drawn to a more traditional approach, but infused it with a sense of Japanese spirit'. Frustratingly, she doesn't elaborate on what the last part means. (An enhanced sense of the proximity between the 'real' and spirit worlds, conceivably?) But traditional, it certainly is. Back in the day, Yoshida danced in Peter Wright's pitch-perfect staging for the Royal Ballet, and that version's heightened aesthetics and complete respect for the 1841 source material clearly got under her skin. Opulently and painstakingly designed by Dick Bird, and with unobtrusive embellishments to the Petipa/Coralli/Perrot choreography by Alastair Marriott – Britons both – this is in fact as 'western' a Giselle as you may ever see, a heartbreaking, almost immersively atmospheric Rhineland ghost story – from Tokyo. Full marks, too for the dancing, across the ranks. Giselle – the dance-obsessed peasant girl in love with Albrecht, an already-betrothed count masquerading as a fellow commoner – is one of the great ballerina roles, and on the opening night Yui Yonezawa made it fly. Intensely musical, and almost impossibly light on her feet, she lends Giselle just the right dash of intensity and fragility, the sense of there being a vulnerable thread just waiting to be fatally unpicked by a lover's betrayal. Her handling of the 'mad scene', in which her jealous would-be paramour Hilarion (Masahiro Nakaya, excellent) unmasks Albrecht and her heart gives out, is marvellously original; her Giselle seems to turn into a wraith before our very eyes, even before the moonlit, magical Act II has begun. She and Shun Izawa's Albrecht – not in quite the same league, but a gutsy, full-blooded interpretation nonetheless – make a convincingly smitten couple in the earthbound Act I. And together they considerably swell the pathos in Act II, when Giselle's ghost, putting love over retribution, sets out to defend her errant ex from an army of 'Wilis', the vengeful spirits of women who were jilted on their wedding days. And what an eye-widening army they are. In the Act I ensembles, on Thursday night, the corps were already displaying a rare cohesiveness; in Act II, they were positively unheimlich. I'm not sure I've ever seen such an utterly uniform, eerily hall-of-mirrors clutch of spectres in any Giselle, such a potent illusion of physical ethereality and subtly martial malevolence. (Incidentally, these oh-so-western wraiths make a beautiful contrast with those of Wimbledon-born Akram Khan's 2016 version for English National Ballet, which he effectively recast as ' yurei ', the lank-haired Japanese phantoms that have haunted many a terrifying movie.) I suppose a cynic might argue that while Wright's Giselle remains a cornerstone of the Royal Ballet's repertory, this is all a bit coals-to-Newcastle. But when those coals are burning this very brightly, you won't hear me complaining.
