The Monaco Monitor

La Belle is back to launch this year’s series of festive season performances by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco from December 21 to January 4. This popular ballet, danced to a Tchaikovsky score and based on the Charles Perrault tale, is narrative, spectacle and psychodrama, with the superb dancing of Bernice Coppieters and ‘the longest kiss in the history of dance’. In choreographing La Belle, the company’s Director Jean-Christophe Maillot turned the spotlight on the human dimensions of the Perrault tale: the contrast between the shadowy world of the Prince and the splendour of La Belle, between good and evil, love and hate. La Belle will be followed on New Year’s Eve by Maillot’s Altro Canto and also William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite. Altro Canto is danced to the music of Monteverdi and the voices of the Ensemble Akadémia. The effect is Harry Potteresque mystery and suspense, a chiaroscuro stage lit by floating candles that illuminate the movements of soaring arms and an embrace that reinvents the classic pas de deux. Forsythe’s Artifact Suite brings to the stage 35 dancers who alternately deconstruct and reconstruct the rules of classical ballet against a background of Bach. It’s a work that creates powerful images, willfully pushing the use of stage machinery and optical illusion to the extreme edge

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 5:49 am and is filed under Social Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.