In a rehearsal studio in central England, dancers are getting to grips with new, heavy metal-inspired ballet steps. Moving gracefully in unison, they team pirouettes with air guitar, leaps with head banging.
Welcome to Black Sabbath — The Ballet, the brainchild of Cuban dance star Carlos Acosta, artistic director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Determined to celebrate the cultural treasures of the UK’s second city since his arrival in 2020, Acosta took his idea to Black Sabbath co-founder and guitarist Tony Iommi, who gave it his blessing along with the group’s original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne.
Photo: AFP
“I was fascinated with the idea. I thought, ‘How are they going to do that?’” Iommi, 75, said Thursday in Birmingham.
“I just couldn’t imagine how they’d do ballet to Black Sabbath and then I thought, well, maybe they’re going to use the ... softer tracks. But no, they went for Black Sabbath, War Pigs, Iron Man,” he said. “I think I was just really intrigued.”
The full-length, three-act ballet opens in Birmingham, the pioneering group’s home city, in September before going on tour. Rehearsals have just begun.
Photo: AFP
NOT A DOCUMENTARY
According to writer Richard Thomas, the ballet is the “rags-to-riches story” of four young men who went from the “factory floor to one of the most successful bands in rock history,” although he stressed it would not be a documentary set to music and dance.
The legendary group’s original line-up was Osbourne, Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward.
Photos: AFP
They were instrumental in creating heavy metal in the early 1970s with dark and high-volume guitars coupled with a keen interest in the occult.
“It’s very simple. It’s like Black Sabbath meets the Birmingham Royal Ballet,” Thomas said.
There would, however, be use of archive interviews and also some famous Black Sabbath stories such as how Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident on his last day working at a sheet metal factory.
Also making an appearance will be the tale of the “Stonehenge” set that had to be dumped after a measurements mix-up meant it was so big it wouldn’t fit into auditoriums.
And he said there might “possibly be a brief mention of the bat incident,” in which Osbourne thought a fan had thrown a rubber bat onstage only to discover — after he took a bite — that it was real.
For Acosta, 39, there had been an immediate rapport with Iommi after he first approached him with the project.
“I didn’t know the man (or) how we were going to hit it off, but obviously we both come from the same background in terms of working-class and poor families ... and the chemistry was instant,” he said.
GLORIOUS IRREGULARITY
The former star dancer said he came to the music of Black Sabbath late due to growing up in Cuba.
“I grew up in the 1980s, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I didn’t know anything about Black Sabbath,” he said, adding that he only discovered the group through a friend in the late 1990s.
“This was the music of those who are marginalized so I found it very interesting,” he adds.
Musically, composer Chris Austin said it had been difficult to know where to start as the Black Sabbath back catalogue was so huge.
But he said once they narrowed it down it had been easy to be inspired by the music’s “glorious irregularity” and “enormous shifts of tempo,” combined with Osbourne’s early “stratospheric” vocals.
The show will be a treat for fans after the group, including three of the original members, ended their last-ever tour with a final concert in Birmingham in 2017.
Iommi said he was as interested as everyone else to discover how the ballet would turn out, but that he had been confident in Acosta and his team from the start.
“I know from our fans that there is a lot of excitement to come to the show,” he said, adding that he expected people would be particularly keen to join in.
“I think it will be great.”
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
July 7 to July 13 Even though the Japanese colonizers declared Taiwan “pacified” on Nov. 18, 1895, unrest was still brewing in Pingtung County. The Japanese had completed their march of conquest down the west coast of Taiwan, stamping out local resistance. But in their haste to conquer the Republic of Formosa’s last stronghold of Tainan, they largely ignored the highly-militarized Liudui (六堆, six garrisons) Hakka living by the foothills in Kaohsiung and Pingtung. They were organized as their name suggested, and commanders such as Chiu Feng-hsiang (邱鳳祥) and Chung Fa-chun (鍾發春) still wanted to fight. Clashes broke out in today’s
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
At times, it almost seems that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is out to sabotage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As if on cue, with the recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers in full swing, Ma thought it would be a good time to lead a delegation of students to China and attend the 17th Straits Forum (海峽論壇) and meet with Wang Huning (王滬寧), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member entrusted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to be his second in command on Taiwan policy and to run the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in charge of subverting enemies,
RSS