Stepping out in three styles

• Source: Global Times
• [09:35 September 08 2010]
• Comments

By Li Yuting

Dance is an art form that naturally keeps people on their toes - with just music and no words. The Shanghai Grand Theater recently saw three forms of dance sharing the stage to explain something of how their magic is created.

An audience of nearly a thousand, mostly parents and children who love ballet and dance, watched choreographers and dancers from the English National Ballet (ENB), the Shanghai Ballet and the Jinxing Ballet Theater showcase representative pieces of dance and explain their works.

The event began with a five-minute episode from the second act of Giselle with two ENB ballet dancers, reliving the moment when Giselle becomes a spirit after her heart has been broken by her beloved Albrecht.

When they concluded, ENB choreographer, Steven Beagley, asked the dancers to repeat a particularly difficult move where the ballerina has to stand en pointe on one leg while her partner circles her.

"In this part, the male dancer must keep the ballerina balanced and walk in a perfect circle not on an angle," Beagley said. To show this more clearly he asked the dancers to do it deliberately wrong. To the amusement of the audience the elegant ballerina nearly fell over this time.

"It is difficult to find fault with experienced dancers because they dance nearly perfectly," Beagley said.

As a choreographer, Beagley has to make sure every expression, every movement, even the position of the dancers' fingers, belong to Giselle, not one of characters from Swan Lake or another classical ballet.

Founded in 1979, the Shanghai Ballet featured in its segment its Shanghai-style original ballet, Bai Mao N and a solo from Hua Yang Nian Hua, a romance set in Shanghai 1936 to a background of war.

The audience immediately recognized the character, Xi'er, danced by a young ballerina with long black long hair and wearing a red coat and green trousers. The dance showed Xi'er waiting for her father in a cold winter night and after the performance, Xin Lili, the artistic director of the Shanghai Ballet, explained the subtleties of movement used in developing the story.

In contrast a male dancer performed a lighthearted sequence from Hua Yang Nian Hua with a distinctive old Shanghai-style costume and using more pronounced movements that still seemingly derived from classical ballet.

The style of classical ballet vanished however when the Jinxing Dance Theater took to the stage.

"Contemporary dance has an inseparable relationship with classical ballet, and many of my dancers have a solid foundation in classical ballet," Jin Xing, the artistic director and founder of the Jinxing Dance Theater, told the audience.