By Serhiy VASYLIEV, The Day
From now on Kyiv's ballet devotees will not feel envious about Moscow regularly
hosting the world's best companies and leading European and American choreographers.
The British Council, which has done a great deal to popularize modern
choreography in Russia, finally turned its attention to Ukraine. The National
Russian Drama Theater in Kyiv will accommodate the Britain's leading Rambert
Dance Company Rambert, March 7-9. The program includes three one-act productions:
Shivona Dyce's On the Road (music score by Steve Reich), Paul Taylor's
Freshness (Handel), and Christopher Bruce's Rooster (the
Rolling Stones).
The latter, a ballet authored by Rambert's artistic director, based
on the famous British rock group's greatest hits, is a harshly realistic
study in relations between the sexes and the sexual aggressiveness of modern
youth.
I am not certain whether the management of the state-run Druzhba Theater
has heard anything about the British Council's initiative, but they seem
to have made a concerted action, announcing the World Ballet Stars Festival
this March. Anyway, capital devotees will be still reliving the leading
British company's performances when Druzhba offers them yet another excellent
program. Well-known ballet groups like Valery Mikhailovsky's male ballet
(St. Petersburg) and the Royal Spanish Ballet, rumored to arrive with the
celebrated guitarist Paco de Lucia, are expected to perform in Kyiv, Kharkiv,
Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia in March.







