The State Ballet of Georgia and Nina Ananiashvili thrilled Saturday night’s audience at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial with their performance of Giselle — and scores lined up in the main hall afterwards for a chance to get a program or poster autographed.
Ananiashvili’s lightness and delicacy were on full display from her very first entrance as the young village maiden who falls in love with a handsome stranger, dancer Vasil Akhmeteli, unaware he is a nobleman. She was a delight to watch from start to finish.
David Ananeli was all passion and anger as Hans, the villager whose love Giselle spurns, and both he and Akhmeteli showed enough torment when she dies to be felt in the upper reaches of the raked auditorium. However, Lali Kandelaki as Myrta, queen of the Wilis, was a bit disappointing. She has beautiful technique, but her character was almost emotionless, instead of the icy coolness and implacability more commonly seen in this role.
Photo Courtesy of The State Ballet of Georgia
The corps de ballet were a vision in white as the ghostly Wilis. It’s too bad the company had to perform at Sun Yat-sen, because the stage isn’t really deep enough. It’s limitations didn’t affect Act One that much, but in Act Two, the last Wilis in line often had to scrunch up against the scenery. And as always, the hall’s sound system was horrific.
Just in case the audience might have forgotten who they were watching, Ananiashvili came out for the curtain calls with a Georgian flag draped around her shoulders, which she handed off to two dancers at the back of the stage to hold aloft for the rest of the curtain calls. The company will finish their visit to Taiwan with three performances of Swan Lake at the Yunlin County Stadium in Douliou, starting on Wednesday.
The Kaohsiung City Ballet gave an inspiring performance on Saturday at the Experimental Theater — albeit on a much smaller scale. Inspiring because the troupe is finally developing some strong male dancers, and Dance Shoe 2011 showed there are still young choreographers tackling ballet.
Especially impressive were Huang Ting-chun (黃庭君) and Wu Cheng-en (吳承恩) in newcomer — to Dance Shoe productions — Chang Chien-kuei’s (張堅貴) Harmony Symphony (諧．奏), set to a score that mixed a piano concerto with excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen (the Toreador song) and La Bayadere. Chang’s choreography drew on the technical strengths of his five dancers, showing off their clean lines — especially the women’s six o’clock extensions — and the men’s gymnastic abilities as well. It was modern, it was playful and it was exciting to watch.
Playfulness was also central to Kao Hsin-yu’s (高辛毓) Smile Holiday (微笑假期), performed by six dancers, in pairs and quartets, to a toe-tapping array of Maurice Chevalier and other French songs. Yeh Ming-hwa’s (葉名樺) solo Small Potatoes (小人物) was a paean to the little guy, with a tip of the hat to Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, complete with a bowler hat and a bit of a drawn-on mustache.
It seemed as if the members of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch did nothing but play in their performance of Agua at the National Theater on Friday night. The 2001 work is a collection of snapshot impressions of Brazil that jumps from windswept palm trees to Amazon rain forest and from beach to cocktail party, although what orangutans and a leopard are doing mixed in there is anyone’s guess since they are not native to Brazil. The piece ended in downright silliness, with an ad hoc waterpipe the dancers created and held up to a video projection of Iguassu Falls. Water gushed out of the pipe and the dancers started spraying each other.
There were plenty of solos, duets and group that allowed the 23 dancers to shine and even a cameo appearance by troupe veteran Dominique Mercy, who now runs the company along with Robert Sturm.
The show was proof that the company is surviving — and thriving — almost two years after Bausch died.
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