Ballet Stafet,
August 20 2012
Summer Tour
June 2012
The Royal Danish Ballet is working hard on outreach projects. In addition to the official annual
appetizer events with the drama and opera departments, the company has done a
ten city summer tour Sbastian Kloborg and Tim Matiakis has premiered a new concept for making ballet hip to a new audience. The result is funny, cool and surprisingly good ballet.
Together with the Event Ministry, an outreach part of the drama department, the two dancers/choreographers has staged "Ballet Stafet" a free entrance mock up mix of ballet and sports, where two teams of three dancers compete against each other in various sports-ballet skills with Morten Eggert as the cool and witty host/commentator. The two teams: Tina Højlund, Nicolai Hansen and Susanne Grinder and Gitte Lindstrøm, Ulrik Birkkjær and Femke Mølbach Slot square off in disciplines like synchronic pas de deux, Bournonville on time and romantic pas de trois.
The format allows the dancers to really use their humour, high light their personality and
timing. And you get proof on how broad the interpretation and comedy skills are in the company. choreographically the high light is a send off on Equestrian dressage, performed by the dead pan funny Nicolai Hansen and a pas de deux without hands with Susanne Grinder and Ulrik Birkkjær in Velcro covered costumes.
In this programme and on the summer tour is has been great to see the post-Camille performances of Susanne Grinder. She has finally discovered how to interact with the audience and her Flower Festival Pas de deux in the summer tour and this programme showed a warm and sunny ballerina really coming over the stage.
The choreography by Kloborg and Matiakis is witty, to the point engaging and free of the pseudo philosophical babble that has characterised the oeuvres of Matakis in his earlier works.
Speaking of Tim Matiakis, he has recently together with the talented choreographer Esther Lee
Wilkinson been appointed to lead the new in-house company "Corpus”. The company will create a full evening performance in May 2013 as well as participating in "The Hübbery" and make other stunts and
performances.
Hopefully this project can be the home for raising the bar on new choreography in RDB. As the
new choreography programme in May made abundantly clear, the list of successful works choreographed on the company is shockingly short. Moving from an outside in strategy to an inside out will hopefully reverse the situation. I hope the ambition level stays high for this project and that it will raise the bar compared to the last ten years result, where big scale production or workshop
creations alike have failed.
Photo copyright: Event Ministery
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