Tag Archives: Matthew Bourne

EIFMAN’S TCHAIKOVSKY

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Choreographer Boris Eifman has created ballets based on the lives of Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, the dancer Olga Spessivtseva (Red Giselle), Rodin and Camille Claudel. A sort of Russian cousin to Matthew Bourne, the two entrepreneurs share a love of recent history viewed through a pop aesthetic that can shade toward camp, if not kitsch—a tendency that delights their fans if not their critics.

This weekend, as part of their 40th-anniversary North American tour, the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg brings a revised TCHAIKOVSKY to the Music Center. For dance audiences, Tchaikovsky’s music is irrevocably tied to several ballets, and in creating his piece, Eifman has avoided making obvious connections. The fact of the composer’s homosexuality has always been suppressed in his native Russia. How much of that tortured history—Tchaikovsky’s and Russia’s—Eifman addresses will be seen onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

TCHAIKOVSKY, Friday and Saturday, June 23 and 24, at 7:30 pm. Sunday, June 25, at 2 pm.

DOROTHY CHANDLER PAVILION, Music Center, downtown Los Angeles.

musiccenter.org/eifman

Boris Eifman.

Boris Eifman is a Russian-Jewish choreographer and the Artistic Director of Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg. Eifman’s parents were both Ukrainians sent to Siberia during WWII, when Eifman was a young child. He studied choreography at the Leningrad...

 

MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES

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Los Angeles is the North American home-away-from-home for British choreographer/entrepreneur Matthew Bourne and his dance company New Adventures. Over the years, local audiences have flocked to his interpretations of Edward Scissorhands, Sleeping Beauty, The Postman Always Rings Twice with music by Bizet (The Car Man), Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey’s The Servant (Play without Words), and a Swan Lake with male swans.

And the Wallis in Beverly Hills is the only American stop for MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES, a local premiere of three early works, as this most theatrical of dance troupes celebrates thirty years on the boards.

The program includes WATCH WITH MOTHER ( a schooldays romp) and TOWN AND COUNTRY (its first half a 1930s Noël Coward fantasia). Bourne closes the evening with THE INFERNAL GALOP—a mashup of Charles Trenet, rough trade (dancer Tom Clark, a standout), and the can–can. “This is France as seen by the uptight English imagination, an equal mix of ancient hostility and deep affection.”*

MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, May 18–20 at 8 pm; Saturday and Sunday, May 20 and 21, at 2 pm.
THE WALLIS, 9390 Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills
thewallis.org/bourne
This fall, Bourne and company will return to Los Angeles with THE RED SHOES, based on the Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger film, with music by Bernard Herrmann.
THE RED SHOES , September 15 through October 1, 2017.
AHNMANSON THEATRE, Music Center, downtown Los Angeles.
centertheatregroup.org/tickets/ahmanson-theatre/additional-events/the-red-shoes/
new-adventures.net/early-adventures
*Program notes
Tom Clark, left, set upon by revelers in The Infernal Galop. Matthew Bourne's Early Adventures Image credit: The Wallis

Tom Clark, left, set upon by revelers in The Infernal Galop. Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures
Image credit: The Wallis