Artscape to raise the curtain on ballet works this winter season

Falling Angels is one of Jiří Kylián’s masterworks for eight women, bristling with the power of the female persona. Picture: Danie Coetzee

Falling Angels is one of Jiří Kylián’s masterworks for eight women, bristling with the power of the female persona. Picture: Danie Coetzee

Published Jun 23, 2022

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Cape Town - From exploring the Japanese concept of purpose, happiness and peace, to retelling a Shakespearean love story set in Verona, Italy.

The Cape Town City Ballet’s (CTCB) winter season will be presenting a line-up of works which runs from August 4 to 28 at Artscape in the Opera House.

The programme will feature Romeo and Juliet based on William Shakespeare’s classic, tragic love story and choreographed by South African ballet doyenne Veronica Paeper.

It will run alongside an invigorating new triple bill IKIGAI, inspired by the Japanese concept of purpose, happiness and peace.

Select performances will star international guest artists, to be announced, and be accompanied by Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.

Gabriel Ravenscroft and Mia Labuschagne in POLARITY. Photo credit Paul Seaby

Performed to Sergei Prokofiev’s dramatic score, William Shakespeare’s quintessential boy-meets-girl tale follows the life course of the ill-fated, star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

The dream creative team is completed with decor and costume design by Peter Cazalet, and lighting design by Wilhelm Disbergen.

IKIGAI is a triple bill, depicted by three generations of award-winning choreographers: Jiří Kylián’s Falling Angels, Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs and Kenneth Tindall’s Polarity, in collaboration with the artists of CTCB.

IKIGAI will be presented from August 17 to 28.

Falling Angels is one of Jiří Kylián’s mesmerising master works for eight women, bristling with the power of the female persona.

“Set to a hypnotic Steve Reich score and inspired by the percussive musical rituals of West Africa, Falling Angels is scintillating in its complexity and richness of movement,” organisers said.

Les Patineurs is staged on CTCB by Isabel McMeekan, who has performed around the world with The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet.

She is currently participating in the Frederick Ashton Foundation’s shadowing scheme set up to train the Ashton repetiteurs of the future.

Award-winning Kenneth Tindall’s Polarity is inspired by the suggestion that opposites are interconnected and everything is dual, a yin and a yang where harmony and balance emerge, and where the outcome can only be peace.

Tindall, who is resident choreographer and digital director for Northern Ballet, created Polarity for CTCB in 2019.

Bookings can be made at Artscape Dial-A-Seat: 021 421 7695 or through Computicket.

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