Tag: Documentary

BBC’s ballet season

BBC2 LogoAs part of a major season of programmes on the BBC, which will also include rare footage of Margot Fonteyn in Sleeping Beauty from the 1950s, ex-Prima ballerina Darcey Bussell will reveal the ballerinas who have inspired her throughout her career and out the other side. BBC2 will present Darcey’s Ballerina Heroines, on 1 March in which she will discuss the dancers who were pivotal in her training and career. The programme will also explore the “history of the ballerina through the female ballet stars who came before her”.

The ballet season will be shown across BBC2 and BBC4 and will feature Fonteyn ’59 – Sleeping Beauty, an edited hour of highlights from Fonteyn’s appearance in Sleeping Beauty in 1959 which has rarely been seen since being filmed. It will be the first time viewers have seen extracts of the version of the ballet since its original screening, and will be broadcast on BBC4 on 7 March.

Meanwhile, Dancing in the Blitz – How WW2 Made British Ballet will be shown on BBC4 on 5 March and will see Birmingham Royal Ballet director David Bintley explore how the Second World War “was the making of British ballet”. It shows how the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, later the Royal Ballet, was formed during the war.

The season will conclude on 9 March with BBC4’s Good Swan, Bad Swan – Dancing Swan Lake, in which English National Ballet artistic director Tamara Rojo will take viewers behind the scenes as she prepares to perform one of the most challenging roles in classical ballet within Swan Lake. Rojo will reveal her insights on the role’s physical and psychological challenges while the season as a whole will give viewers a real glimpse behind the scenes of the ballet world.

News from New Adventures

New AdventuresThe 25th anniversary of Matthew Bourne’s company New Adventures was 2012, and was perhaps one of the busiest in the company’s history. With the continued success of Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty in 2013, it seems there is no stopping the contemporary, theatrical company.

New Adventures recently announced that Sleeping Beauty will tour the United States from September this year, playing two week seasons in Cleveland (Playhousesquare), New York (City Center) and Los Angeles (Ahmanson Theatre) in addition to a week-long engagement at the prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Opening at the Civic Center in Des Moines on 27 September, the three month tour will also travel to Schenectady (Proctors) and Charlotte(Blumenthal Performing Arts). The US tour will follow the current record-breaking UK tour of the production, which is also due to visit The Ravenna Festival in Italy (29 May – 2 June) and the company’s fifth visit to The Chekhov International Festival in Moscow (11 -16 June).

Holiday plans have also been announced, with the original cast of Sleeping Beauty being filmed at the Bristol Hippodrome in May for later broadcast on UK and International television over the Christmas period. This will be followed by a subsequent DVD release: the film will be directed by Ross MacGibbon, who has collaborated many times with Matthew Bourne on previous award-winning New Adventures films, including the recent Imagine Documentary, “A Beauty Is Born”.

In the unveiling of another production for the company, Scottish Ballet will be presenting Highland Fling having been granted the rights to perform it. Highland Fling was originally produced in 1994, and was revived in 2005 before the exclusive 2013 Scottish Ballet production as an imaginative reworking of the classic romantic ballet La Sylphide with a wickedly wry Scotch twist.

First Position

First PositionFirst Position, a ballet documentary-come-movie to be screened in cinemas in the UK, paints a thrilling and moving portrait of the most gifted ballet stars of tomorrow as they prepare for the chance to enter the world of professional ballet. Bess Kargman’s award-winning box office hit documentary follows six extraordinary dancers, complete with bruises, blood, injuries and near exhaustion, as they follow their dreams and enter the Youth America Grand Prix, held annually in New York for boys and girls aged 8 to 19.

Every year, thousands of aspiring dancers enter the Youth America Grand Prix as one of the world’s most prestigious ballet competitions where talented dancers compete for the coveted title. In the final round hundreds of young dancers compete for only a handful of elite scholarships and contracts and it is imperative that nothing short of perfection is performed. First Position showcases the awe-inspiring talent and passion that is displayed by the dancers, and had its World Premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and was named the audience choice’s first runner-up for Best Documentary. It also won the Jury Prize at the San Francisco Doc Fest, the audience award for Best Documentary at the Dallas International Film Festival, the audience award for Best Documentary at the Portland International Film Festival, and the audience award for Best Documentary at DOC NYC.

First Position centres around the protagonist characters of Jules Jarvis Fogarty, age 10, Aran Bell, age 11, Gaya Bommer Yemini, age 11, Miko Fogarty, age 12, Michaela DePrince, age 14, Joan Sebastian Zamora, age 16, and Rebecca Houseknecht, age 17. The dancers are from all over the world, and First Position reveals the dancers’ fates, with most of the group emerging from the competition with a statuette, award, scholarship or contract with a ballet company.