Let’s look at how to appreciate Danses Concertantes Ballet.
This is a one act ballet and it was choreographed by the Scottish Kenneth MacMillan. This was his first commission.
The music is Stravinsky and the Decor was originally done by Nicholas Geogiadis.
Danses Concertantes Ballet was first performed by the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre on the 18 of January 1955.
Maryon Lane, Donald Britton and David Pool were the dancers for this first performance.
The ballet was redesigned by Nicholas Georgiadis in 1979
Appreciating The Danses Concertantes Ballet
When the curtain fell after the first performance of Danses Concertantes, the excitement of the occasion must have been obvious to the whole audience.
It is a plotless ballet.
The choreography consists of an intricate suite of dances. There is a bustling general dance full of entrances and exits for the company, a pas de trois, a rumbustious solo for a male dancer, an adagio for a ballerina and five cavaliers, and a pas de deux.
This is first professional work by a young Royal Ballet dancer was an amazing piece, glittering with inventiveness, intensely personal in its expression.
It seems a kaleidoscope in which all the old, accepted dance ideas had been thoroughly shaken up by this new talent, to form fresh and intriguing patterns.
Not many first ballets can retain their place in a repertory year after year, but whenever it has been revived, Danses Concertantes’ interest seems to increase, for here are many of the qualities that have been so richly extended in MacMillan’s later work.
This cool view of a hothouse was full of unexpected allusions as dancers are as interesting sitting down on chairs as they are when working in class,. Fingers make mysterious masks and the dancers are like horsemen and gymnasts and movie sirens.
It was an explosion of bright dance ideas that never lost sight of those fundamental truths of the classic tradition that had produced and educated MacMillan, and nothing he has created since has departed from this basic belief in the academic dance.
This ballet lives because it perennially suites young dancers in a young company.
Encouraged by the response of audiences and critics, MacMillan decided to stop dancing and to commit himself wholeheartedly to choreography.
This is a video of George Balanchine’s version.
And this my friends is how to appreciate Danses Concertantes in all it’s glory.
