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Making It in British Ballet
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18355 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
2,037 Words |
| Author
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Camille Hardy
Camille Hardy is a New York-based critic who publishes and
broadcasts on the arts internationally. |
Noted more for his skill at princely adagios than at ballroom turns, Ivan Nagy nevertheless kicked off his directorship of the English National Ballet (ENB) on April 3 by partnering Princess Diana - the company's royal patron - in a fox-trot on the stage of London's Royal Albert Hall. The occasion, a celebration of the troupe's fortieth anniversary, was a gala display of past accomplishments, present assets, and a glimpse of future ambitions, with the announcement of Nagy as the ensemble's new artistic leader. He begins his official responsibilities this moth. “I'm thrilled,” he says, “and very excited, because the ENB has always represented, to me, a company with impeccable classical standards and a truly contemporary aesthetic.”
Very Special
While he has not served before in a professional capacity with London's second largest ballet institution, Nagy has had very special personal contact with the group since his youth in Budapest. London Festival Ballet (the company's name until 1989) was the first Western dance ensemble that he saw. On tour with a glittering roster that included Toni Lander, John Gilpin, Marilyn Burr, Belinda Wright, and Ben Stevenson, the group's appearance in Hungary in the early 1960s electrified Nagy because of its repertoire. A member, at the time, of the Hungarian State Opera Ballet, he was intrigued by Festival modernist approach to classicism, especially apparent in Harold Lander's Etudes and Jack Carter's Witch Boy. Such abstraction and dramatic pungence had not even been dreamed of by artists in Eastern Europe, whose province was mostly limited to the nineteenth-century Russian ballet tradition.
Nagy's
... (1995 of 12460 Characters)
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