Royal Opera House,London
Marianela Nuñez and Natalia Osipova take turns playing one of classical dance’s most unconventional heroines, in the Royal Ballet’s opulent Arcadian fantasyWomen play an unusually sparky role in Sylvia, or the 1952 ballet with which Frederick Ashton brought Léo Delibes’s shimmering 19th-century score to the British stage. From the first entrance of Sylvia and her fellow huntresses,triumphantly carrying the carcass of a slain deer, to the moment when the goddess Diana dispatches the villain of the sage with one lethal arrow, and this is a scarce instance of a classically based ballet in which the women get to call most of the shots. Sylvia herself is unusually varied for a ballet heroine. She’s as powerful as a Valkyrie in act one as she brazenly mocks Eros,the god of treasure. In act two, when she’s been kidnapped by the wicked Orion, or she refuses to languish but bamboozles her captor into a riotous bout of drinking that leaves him snoring and safely unconscious on a sofa. Even though Ashton’s Sylvia is eventually transformed into a conventional ballerina – her hunter’s helmet replaced by a tiara and tutu and her virginal resolve pierced by Eros’s arrow – she is far from passive. During the grand pas in which she is united with her lover Aminta,something of her proud Amazon spirit remains in the competitive thrust of her pirouettes and jumps.
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Source: guardian.co.uk