As their current season comes to a close, Birmingham Royal Ballet prepares for its summer triple bill featuring ballets by George Balanchine, Juliano Nunes, and David Bintley.
Balanchine’s celebrated early masterpiece Apollo highlights the genius of its then 24-year old creator, and launched his lifelong partnership with the composer Igor Stravinsky. This pristine ballet was regarded by Balanchine as his artistic coming of age. Its pared-back elegance gives the perfect platform for the company’s dancers and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia to shine.
Nunes’s Interlinked was premiered lat summer as part of the Birmingham 2022 Festival. Featuring a specially composed score by Australian composer Luke Howard, and lighting design from Netherlands-based Northern Irish designer Tom Visser, this international team created an abstract piece that explores themes of unity, the influences that we have on each other’s lives, and how the energy that we exude bounces from one person to the next, in a never ending circle.
The piece for 16 dancers will also explore themes around gender identity and the perception of self, falling into four distinct movements.
A colorful host of endangered animals seek shelter from the storm in Bintley’s ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Café. Featuring a morris-dancing flea, a ballroom-dancing ram, a hoe-downing rat, a majestic zebra and many more, this is a witty and enjoyable, yet bittersweet and poignant look at humankind’s effect on the world.
Danced to Simon Jeffes’s score, originally composed for the Penguin Café Orchestra, it was last performed by the company in 2017 and was created in 1988 when Bintley was resident choreographer at The Royal Ballet.
All performances of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s performances will take place at Birmingham Hippodrome.
- June 8 @ 7:30 PM
- June 9 @ 7:30 PM
- June 10 @ 2:30 PM & 7:30 PM
Featured Photo of Birmingham Royal Ballet‘s Elisha Willis as Terpsichore, Nao Sakuma as Polyhymnia and Iain Mackay as Apollo in George Balanchine’s Apollo. Photo Bill Cooper.
