Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Some experiences are more transformative than you expect. That's what Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's staff and dancers have been discovering as they ready for the local premiere of an acclaimed ballet about the Holocaust.
'We realized we were getting into something more than just a ballet. It's a community-wide event,' executive director Harris Ferris says."
4 comments:
I am very excited to hopefully see this ballet when it comes through. I remember commenting earlier upon a review of the ballet's Sleeping Beauty. The costumes were gorgeous, the dancing was well performed - but all the show came down to was pretty fluff. There was no real meaning to it. I'm very excited to see dance used in a way to be relevant and expressive - that to me is so much more exciting than classical dancing.
This sounds like a really interesting ballet. It is really pushing the limits of the audience, to accept something seen as "taboo". What I immediately did after reading the article, was to double check PBT's season. They just finished Sleeping Beauty, and are looking towards The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake. They have three GIANT money making shows this season, so I can see why they are going out on a limb with this piece. I'm not saying that this show won't have merit to it, but it's new, and audiences won't be as immediately responsive to it as they would Swan Lake or Nutcracker.
This ballet brings a subject that is already easily capable of eliciting an emotional response from an audience, and adds the elements of theatricality and dance to create even more emotion. I think this is an incredibly interesting idea, and would be very interested to see this production, specifically because it isn't like anything that I've seen done before. This really explores what levels you can reach people with through dance, and how well ballet can send a message to society
Light looks to be an incredibly powerful show. I can't wait to see this when it comes out. I'm fascinated to see how they captured so much emotion and context without the use of spoken word. I really respect the fact that the choreographer doesn't narrowly focus on the holocaust. It was one of the worst genocides in human history if you look at the numbers, but it was by no means the only one. The armenian genocide, for example, almost completely wiped out the armenian population, but very few people have even heard of it. Taking the idea of what this does to a person, and what is, is, to my mind, so much more powerful than concentrating on a single event and making the show allegorical.
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