Huang’s two works and Cheng’s piece are well worth seeing again. Hopefully, the TCO and Cloud Gate will find a way of doing additional performances. It would be a shame if this trio were packed away in the archives.
On Saturday night, the 3rd International Ballet Star Gala began with a bang at the National Theater as Daniil Simkin soared through Vasily Vainonen’s Flames of Paris with partner Ashely Bouder in turns and leaps so high it took your breath away. The couple had the audience screaming — ear piercing shrieks — for more when they appeared in the next-to-the-last piece of the evening, Marius Petipa’s gala warhorse Le Corsaire.
But every piece on the 14-work program was a delight to watch, and several were revelations, especially those by choreographers not seen before in Taipei, such as David Dawson’s Giselle Act II Pas de Deux and Grey Area and Christopher Wheeldon’s Prokofiev Pas de Deux. With both of the pas de deux, it was wonderful to see new life breathed into well-loved music and stories.
Isabelle Ciaravola and Alexandre Riabko also brought new passion to an excerpt from John Neumeier’s La Dame Aux Camellias.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, Elisa Carrillo Cabrera and Mikhail Kaniskin, both with the Berlin Staatsballett, had audiences gasping, laughing and crying for more with the finale, Christian Spuck’s Le Grand Pas de Deux, which glorifies the traditional duet and turns its conventions on their head, beginning with a white tutu-clad Cabrera wearing a big pair of black eyeglasses and carrying an equally large white purse.
Taiwanese ballerina Wang Tzer-shing (王澤馨) was greeted with well-earned screams and applause when she appeared for the curtain call for having pulled together such a wonderful program. The audience was reluctant to leave the theater but everyone appeared to leave with huge grins on their faces.
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