Just over two months after staging the 12th International Ballet Star Gala in Taipei and Taichung, Wang Tzer-shing (王澤馨) is headed back to Taichung for a one-night show with another stellar line-up of principal dancers from some of the world’s leading companies.
It will be the second ballet gala that Art Wave, the company run by Wang and her husband Chat Tzongue (謝宗益), has staged just for National Taichung Theater, following a production in February last year.
While there will be some familiar faces, such as the Mariinsky Theater’s Igor Kolb, who has danced in almost every one of the couple’s galas, including the two in Taichung, there are several who are less familiar to local audiences, such as Kolb’s Mariinsky colleagues Alexander Sergeev and Elena Evseeva, and Lee Sangeun from the Dresden SemperOpera Ballett.
Photo courtesy of Art Wave Inc
The rest of the line-up is equally stellar: Paris Opera Ballet star Dorothee Gilbert, Evgenia Obraztsova from the Bolshoi Theatre, the husband and wife duo Elisa Carrillo Cabrera and Mikhail Kaniskin from the Staatsballett Berlin, Lee’s Dresden’s colleague Raphael Coumes-Marquet and the American Ballet Theater’s Hee Seo and Cory Stearns.
Thursday’s program promises to be interesting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the number of solos that will be performed and the mixing and matching of partners.
Usually dancers from the same company perform together, but Sterns will be partnering Hee in an excerpt of Anthony Tudor’s famed The Leaves Are Fading and the Sleeping Beauty Pas de Deux, as well as Gilbert in an excerpt from Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon; while Kolb will partner Obraztsova in an excerpt from Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and then dance Tango, choreographed by Sanchez Blok, with Sergeev, which just had its world premiere in June in Poland.
Photo courtesy of Gene Schiavone
George Balanchine’s Jewels will be represented by two variations, Carrillo Cabrera will perform the solo from the Emeralds segment and Lee and Comes-Marquet will dance the pas de deux from the Diamonds segment.
Other solos include Obraztsova in Vladimir Vasiliev’s Sentimental Waltz, Gilbert in Mikhail Fokine’s short but classic The Dying Swan, and Evseeva will dance Nikiya from Marius Petipa’s La Bayadere.
Among the more modern works on the program are an excerpt from Nacho Duato’s Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness, which will be danced by Carrillo Cabrera and Kaniskin; and David Dawson’s The Grey Area, performed by Lee and Comes-Marquet.
Rounding out the program are Evseeva and Sergeev in Vasily Vainonen’s Moskovsky Waltz, a 1940 piece for the Bolshoi, and Christian Spuck’s The Grand Pas de Deux, danced by Carrillo Cabrera and Kaniskin.
Wang has been raising the barre every year with her galas and they have yet to disappoint. The Taichung program looks like another winner.
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