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===== La Sylphide =====

Published Sun, Mar 28, 2010 02:00 AM
Modified Sat, Mar 27, 2010 11:27 PM
Old dance is new at Carolina Ballet\\

RALEIGH Carolina Ballet this week will present an old ballet, although chances are you've never seen it.

You certainly weren't around when "La Sylphide" premiered in 1836 as a revolutionary piece of dance, becoming one of the oldest story ballets performed today.

The Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen presented Auguste Bournoville's soaring mix of fantasy and reality, with swan queens and firebirds, and dancers rising on their toes and being lifted into the air. "The era of the romantic ballet begun by this ballet is still much with us," Francis Mason wrote in his book, "101 Stories of the Great Ballets."

It's the story of a love triangle that unfolds on the eve of the wedding of a young Scotsman to his childhood sweetheart. But an invisible creature known as a sylph enchants him, and he must choose between the two.

There has never been a professional production of "La Sylphide" in the Triangle.

But Robert Weiss, artistic director of Carolina Ballet, knows it well. Weiss ran the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1989, when its production of "La Sylphide" was broadcast on PBS. It starred Melissa Podcasy, who is Weiss' wife and a principal dancer at Carolina Ballet, and Marin Boieru, now balletmaster for the local company.

It's that televised production that will be the basis of the program in Raleigh.

"It is a work of beauty that floats and soars," Weiss said in a statement the company released.

Also on the program is a perennial favorite, choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett's "Nine by Twelve." Set to the music of J.S. Bach performed by the Four Voices ensemble, the ballet comprises nine vignettes performed by 12 dancers.

"Bach's complex exchange of melodic statements among the instruments suggest conversations," Taylor-Corbett said in the statement. "I have always been drawn to the music but it was not until I heard this recording that I imagined myself putting these works to dance."

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