 |
| A Delicate Battle |
| Composer: J. S. Bach Music: Ricercar (3 - 6) / Composer: Gavin Bryars Music: After The Requiem Choreography: Matjash Mrozewski Designer: Christopher Read Lighting Designer: Christopher Dennis |
 |
|
| BATTLE ROYAL
Matjash Mrozewski (hey, just call him Matt) is quickly becoming one of the hottest choreographers in town. With funky works for Fashion Cares, Dancers for Life and fFIDA under his belt, the brooding 20-something second soloist with the National Ballet of Canada now premieres A Delicate Battle with the company. It's on a mixed program with works by George Balanchine and John Alleyne. Not bad company. And think about the exposure. Most contemporary choreographers play to houses of, say, a hundred a night -- if they're lucky. Mrozewski's piece will be seen by thousands. Let's see if he's ready./ Review |
| A Delicate Battle at the National Ballet of Canada/ Home |
 |
 |
| Choreographed by Mrozewski as his first major commissioned piece for the company, A Delicate Battle is a worthy centrepiece to an evening that includes John Alleyne's classically themed Septet -- inspired by the work of painter Jean-Honore Fragonard and set to the music of Igor Stravinsky -- and George Balanchine's timeless Theme And Variations -- set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky .
For his part, Mrozewski sets his Battle to two very different, yet highly complementary compositions -- from the classical world, J.S. Bach's Ricercar and from The Musical Offering and from the contemporary canon, Gavin Bryars' After The Requiem. It opens with seven dancers -- Greta Hodgkinson, Aleksandar Antonijevic, Tanya Howard, Nehemiah Kish, Heather Ogden, Je-an Salas and Philip Lau. In modern attire, they dance under a silken canopy, seemingly oblivious to both the snow that falls around them and the dancers in period dress that weave their way through the work in progress. Suddenly, both modern dancers and canopy disappear, and as the snow continues to fall, the stage is claimed by those visitors from another era -- Tiffany Knight, Keiichi Hirano, Rebekah Rimsay, Patrick Lavoie, Sonia Rodriguez and Rex Harrington. What ensues is, in fact, a very delicate battle as the three couples enact scene after scene of conquest, combining great grace and beauty with passion, pain, pathos and surrender. Snow continues to fall, creating a disorienting feeling that makes it difficult to determine whether snow is falling on the dancers or if the dancers are flying up into the snow. Inspired by the artists' struggle to create in a corporate and political world, the work is beautifully but sparely designed by Christopher Read and Christopher Dennis. / Review |
 |
| This site and all related sites are for entertainment and reserch and contains information that anyone
can get by using a search engine, such as Google./ This site is a sub-site of SF ART World // Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. |