« The best thing to put on sliced bread | Main | Shopping and Dining with Mom »
January 22, 2006
Just call me Cassandra
Via pmeja at Ballet Talk, Molly Glentzer speaks about Stanton Welch's Brave New Houston Ballet:
Five years from now, will traditional classical ballet exist in Houston? Maybe not, if Houston Ballet continues on the neoclassical arc artistic director Stanton Welch has set.. . .
The requisite story ballets by Ben Stevenson and Welch "provide the full spectrum of drama, from tongue-in-cheek horror (Dracula) to tragedy (Madame Butterfly) to comedy (Coppélia)," Welch says. He says Dracula is one of the company's most-requested productions.
While these works may be box-office hits, purists may note that they are not, in the strict sense, artistically demanding classics. Welch says he built the season around the story ballets, although "there isn't a huge vocabulary from which to pick."
Five years from now, when the company tries to do The Sleeping Beauty again (only for ticket sales, of course) and they discover they can't get through it, maybe they'll realize that classical repertory and training aren't something you can keep in a cookie jar up on a shelf and only take down when needed.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at January 22, 2006 11:55 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.leighwitchel.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/371
Comments
Dracula is the worst excuse for a story ballet I've ever seen. Utter crap. You'd think that a corps that didn't have any actual dancing wouldn't be ragged, but you'd be wrong.
Posted by: TexAnne at January 23, 2006 11:13 AM