Review | Breakneck Hong Kong ballet brings screams and cheers from the audience in a show of emotion rarely seen in the city
- Andonis Foniadakis’ Strangelove, part of Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘The Rule Breakers’ programme, took the audience on a frenetic non-stop ride of extreme action
- Masterpieces by George Balanchine and William Forsythe received a warm reception, but it was Foniadakis’ work that brought the biggest response
Hong Kong Ballet’s “The Rule Breakers” was a triple bill of one-act ballets: two 20th-century classics, by George Balanchine and William Forsythe, as well as a new work created for the company by Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis.
The dancing throughout was among the best I have seen from the company in recent years, doing full justice to the first two pieces and tackling the extreme challenges of the third undaunted.
The programme is intended to showcase choreographers who have broken new boundaries in ballet as a genre. While Balanchine certainly did this in many of his works, Serenade is an odd choice since it is among his more conventional pieces in terms of movement.
Created in 1934 and set to Tchaikovsky’s ravishing Serenade for Strings in C, it is a work of supreme lyricism and deceptive simplicity whose luminous beauty and subtle sense of mystery are hard to capture.
Previous stagings by Hong Kong Ballet in 2014 and 2016 were less than satisfying. Happily, the company rose to a different level this time around.
