Ballet – Christopher Wheeldon celebration

Edit: I have to share with you some pictures of last night 🙂

Click on DanceTab’s flickr for more

I had to pick a few from their beautiful collection, click for bigger images and have a look at the gallery above as well for more:

The finale of the pas de deux in the video you have below from After the Rain/Wheeldon. The incredible Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares (photo by DanceTabs)

The new ballet, Strapless was fabulously decadent, beautiful costumes and shallow people depicting a world of self-indulgence and conceit 🙂

Natalia Osipova in Strapless as Virginie Amélie Gautreau, first celebrity adored by society and then shunned because she dared appear in a painting … strapless (one strap fallen off).

 She was beautifully frivolous and ultimately so vulnerable, great portrayal.I have to share with you the scene which was part of the painting process: the painter John Singer Sargent, searching for inspiration, imagines the presence of his lover and muse, Albert de Belleroche:

Matthew Ball as Albert on the left and the intense painter, Ed Watson on the right 🙂 Photo by DanceTabs

 If you click through the gallery in the link above the last photo is of Sarah Lamb and Steve McRae frolicking sprightly in the woods. Within the Golden Hour, the last of the 3 ballets last night had a deep sense of connection with nature which was a great ending.

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It has been a full on week, but it ends beautifully with a night at the ballet. A celebration marked by 3 pieces of one of my favourite contemporary choreographers, Christoper Wheeldon. The music of the pieces is perfect and all my favourite dancers of the Royal Ballet will be on stage tonight. I feel incredibly lucky and am very much looking forward to this! So i wanted to share with you a few videos of the ballets i will see tonight, via news article from the ROH which talks about the works, enjoy!

After the Rain / Strapless /Within the Golden Hour

Our quick introduction to The Royal Ballet’s mixed programme celebrating choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.

Lauren Cuthbertson and Christopher Wheeldon in rehearsal for Strapless, The Royal Ballet © 2016 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

A Celebration

Christopher Wheeldon, Artistic Associate of The Royal Ballet, is a familiar figure to Covent Garden audiences – but this is the first time the Company has presented an all-Wheeldon mixed programme. It offers an opportunity to see just how widely his choreographic talent ranges. Two acclaimed abstract ballets, created for American companies, bookend a new narrative commission from The Royal Ballet, bringing together different sides of Wheeldon’s career.

Music and Dance

For the three ballets in this programme Wheeldon has used the music of three very different contemporary composers. The beautiful simplicity of Arvo Pärt comes first, a haunting setting for Wheeldon’s After the Rain. Italian minimalist composer Ezio Bossoprovides the score for Within the Golden Hour, incorporating music by Vivaldi. And in-between comes a dynamic new score from Mark-Anthony Turnage, specially written forStrapless. Turnage has previously collaborated with Wheeldon on ‘Trespass’ (Metamorphosis: Titian 2012), co-choreographed with Alastair Marriott.

After the Rain

Wheeldon created After the Rain in 2005 for New York City Ballet. This abstract ballet for three couples has become most widely known for its deeply affecting pas de deux, set to Pärt’s profoundly moving Spiegel im Spiegel. The pas de deux has often been performed on its own, including by The Royal Ballet in a 2012 gala performance, and was famously captured on film with NYCB principals Maria Kowroski and Ask la Courdancing at dawn on the roof of a skyscraper on the World Trade Center site. This is the first time the work has come to the Royal Opera House in its entirety.

Strapless

For this new narrative ballet Wheeldon has drawn inspiration from an arresting portrait byJohn Singer Sargent – one that, in its time, was the source of much controversy. Sargent’s 1884 portrait of Amélie Gautreau – titled Madame X – was intended to strengthen her position as one of Paris’s most celebrated society beauties. But, thanks in large part to the painted detail of a strap slipping scandalously from her shoulder, the work tarnished Amélie’s reputation forever. Inspired by Deborah Davis’s book Strapless, Wheeldon takes us inside the glamorous beau monde of Amélie and Sargent, and explores the ever fickle nature of celebrity.

Within the Golden Hour

Within the Golden Hour was created in 2008 for San Francisco Ballet, to mark the company’s 75th anniversary. Wheeldon choreographed the work for 14 dancers, and includes much of his characteristically inventive handling of ensembles. Three centralpas de deux lead to a finale in which the whole cast comes together in a single, shimmering formation.

After the Rain / Strapless / Within the Golden Hour runs 12 February–11 March 2016.

Original article by PAUL KILBEY Ccontent producer- ballet Royal Opera House