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BWW Reviews: THE 10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET ICONS GALA, London Coliseum, March 8 2015

By: Mar. 10, 2015
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I overheard someone say in the interval, "It's like watching Lionel Messi score a goal every ten seconds." That analogy works well on at least two levels for the
Russian Ballet Icons Gala: (i) as is the case with the mesmerising Messi, the excellence just keeps coming; and (ii) the balance, presence and grace of the performers suggests they're of a different species to us lumbering bipeds in the stalls.

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With the rich fullness of the ENO Orchestra swelling and surging in the auditorium, the dancers turned on one party piece after another, drawing on ballets old and new. I was particularly impressed by three very contrasting segments.

In an extract from the finale of Mayerling, dance really did fit a description I once heard - "the vertical expression of horizontal desire". Kenneth MacMillan's choreography and Franz Liszt's music overflowed with love and death and the dancers (Alina Cojocaru, Johan Kobburg and Alexander Campbell) held nothing back in their commitment to love and death.

With a huge shift of gear (and an indicator of the breadth of material that comprised the Gala), Xander Parish acoompanied by a strident voiceover - think JK Simmons in Whiplash - gave us 100 ballet positions in numerical order and then, at the wish of the insistent voice, mixed them up to create shapes, movement, wonder. It's not so much that he made the difficult look easy - he made the extraordinarily difficult look possible.

The final scene showed all of ballet's grace and power in a remarkable set of extracts from Don Quixote. Olesya Novikova flittered like a bird, barely touching the floor, in Spanish red and black. But Kimin Kim was transfixing in his power and presence - surely he could have chosen to be an Olympic athelete in half a dozen disciplines!

With the curtain calls continuing long beyond mere appreciation for this international ensemble of talents, one can only expect an 11th Russian Ballet Icons Gala in 2016. Start saving up for a ticket now!



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