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| | Arts Calendar / November 19 / Ballet |
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19:00 | Lady of the Camellias |
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Ballet by John Neumeier in three acts with a prologue to music by Frederic Chopin after the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas. Choreography, staging and light - John Neumeier. Sets and costumes - Jurgen Rose. Music Director - Pavel Sorokin. John Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias, a big, narrative ballet set to original concert music by Chopin is based on the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas junior, written in 1848. The story is based on true events in the author's life when, at the age of 20, he fell in love with Marie Duplessis who was to die at the age of 23. Like the George Cukor film starring Greta Garbo and Verdi's La Traviata with Maria Callas before it, it is a masterpiece. Marguerite Gautier is a famous Parisian courtesan who falls in love with Duval when they are introduced at a performance of Manon Lescaut. Stricken by tuberculosis, she goes to live in the country where her young lover comes to join her. But their idyll is broken by his father who comes to plead with Marguerite that her liaison with his son is compromising the family honour. He demands she leave Armand to protect his daughter's reputation. Suffocated by the society she lives in as much as by a physical disease, Marguerite, heartbroken, returns to her old way of life. Armand, believing himself spurned, only learns the depth of her devotion when reading her diary after she has died in poverty, rejected by her former friends. The choreography, rich and inventive, is outstanding from beginning to end while the dramatic intensity is sustained in a whole series of sublime pas de deux. Whether it be in the slightest movement of the hand or the merest glance, Neumeier, choreographer poet, has exactly the right gesture for every shade of emotion.
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