And for today…. Swan Lake! This has been one of my favourite ballet moments for as long as I remember, starting with that VHS (I’m not that old, but…) of Makhalina and Zelensky that I pretty much killed because of watching it continuously. So I’m leaving you with one of the most beautiful classical ballet pas de deux there is… White Swan.
My pick is the moment Odette does a developpe to the front, then “falls” back and Siegfried catches her, in this video it is around 50:00 (long video ;)). To be honest I prefer when the guy waits for her to go a bit further back before catching her, but here is done beautifully with the music and her arms are so swan-like…, so I don’t mind that much. Also lovely that just at the end of the second repetition the music changes and the swans start moving more, sheer perfection!

And for the contemporary pick, I thought we should give a bit of space to video dance or dance for camera. Now this is a huge field, and some companies/choreographers have been working a lot through this medium, but I also wanted to pay homage to one of the most clever choreographers around… William Forsythe. We have had the opportunity to watch his Artifact, a piece created in 1984 that uses a lot of ideas that are being presented as innovative now (ok, this is personal opinion, but isn’t that what a blog is for? :P). So I’m leaving you with one of his works for camera, One Flat Thing Reproduced. I’m going to choose the sequence with the two male dancers around 2:22. Because it has great dynamics, great use of space/tables and a fantastic way of relating their movements together. But it is all very cool (who wouldn’t want to pull the tables like that?)

Enjoy!!