Trois Gnossiennes. The latter has been sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Embassy and Pomegranate Trust and was seen for the first time, to great acclaim, at the Royal Ballet Gala at Artscape in July this year.
During the limited season of Cape Town City Ballet Celebrates 10 Years, the company will present a sparkling once-off gala entitled Tribute To The Stars, honouring one of the greatest dance partnerships in this country, that of former Prima Ballerina Assoluta Phyllis Spira and her danseur noble Eduard Greyling.
For the gala, original footage of Spira and Greyling's spectacular careers with CAPAB Ballet will be shown, in ballets such as the Sleeping Beauty, Orpheus in the Underworld, Don Quixote, Le Corsaire and the Bacchanale pas de deux. Phyllie and Eddie, as they were affectionately known during their ballet days, danced together for more than 17 years, receiving critical acclaim from directors and choreographers in South Africa and abroad. Today, Spira works alongside husband and former CAPAB Ballet principal, Philip Boyd, on the Dance for All programme, which Boyd founded on the late David Poole's legacy. Spira teaches on the programme and is the Assistant Artistic Director of the Dance for All Youth Company. Greyling holds a DMus degree in Benesh Notation, a subject in which he currently lectures at the UCT School of Dance. He is the patron of the Cecchetti Society and was recently awarded a Fellowship by the Benesh Institute in London for his groundbreaking work in the notation of African dance. He is also a freelance dance critic for Die Burger.
The Cape Town City Ballet (CTCB), with a new Board in place, sees this performance as the launch of the next decade of its success. Originally formed as the University of Cape Town Ballet Co in 1934, and then the CAPAB Ballet in 1963 before transforming into the Cape Town City Ballet in 1997, the CTCB has introduced more than 20 new ballets into its repertoire in the last ten years - ballets ranging from the purely classical Schubert Symphony by Choo San Goh (1999), through Jean Paul Comelin's neo-classical Les Nuits d'Ete (2000) and Rudi van Dantzig's Four last Songs (2006), to Adele Blank's contemporary Syzygy (2004) and Sean Bovim's smash rock hit, Queen at the Ballet (2005). The traditional classics have regularly been performed alongside the many ballets by Veronica Paeper, which formed the backbone of the repertoire in the 80's and early 90's, bringing ballet at its finest to a broad-based audience.
Tribute to the Stars is one of only four performances in CTCB's 10th anniversary celebration season which runs from 11 to 14 October 2007, with the gala performance taking place at 8pm on Saturday, 13th October 2007. |
