The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Kings of Leon cancel US tour after Dallas concert cut short Posted: 02 Aug 2011 05:16 AM PDT  American rock band Kings of Leon are cancelling the remainder of their US tour. – AFP pic US dates are cancelled and won't be rescheduled due to the band's international tour schedule this fall, according to an announcement on the band's website. Tickets will be refunded. The band will resume touring in Canada at the Rogers Center in Vancouver on September 28. That show was originally scheduled for September 14. After Followill left the stage in Dallas, the band issued an official apology to fans, then took to Twitter to further discuss the situation. "Dallas, I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am. There are internal sicknesses & problems that have needed to be addressed. No words," Caleb's brother Jared Followill tweeted on Saturday. "I love our fans so much. I know you guys aren't stupid. I can't lie. There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade," he added later. The third brother Nathan also sent a Tweet saying: "Not so good morning 4 me today. Ashamed & embarrassed by last nights fiasco. Can't apologise enough, utterly gutted. A million I'm sorry's." Founded in 1999, the band has five albums behind it, including its latest album, Come Around Sundown, which debuted at number one in eight countries. – AFP Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Cutting-edge ballet rocks Russia’s Bolshoi Posted: 02 Aug 2011 03:45 AM PDT  Russian ballet dancers perform British choreographer Wayne McGregor's 'Chroma'. – AFP pic "Chroma", British choreographer Wayne McGregor's 2006 exploration of the influence of psychology on movement, is a sharp contrast to the 19th-century narrative ballets that have been the staple of the Bolshoi repertoire. Set to a pulsating, dissonant score of orchestrations of White Stripes songs as well as original music by British composer Joby Talbot, "Chroma" demands from its 10 performers a whole new vocabulary of dance. Legs are flung out in extensions at all angles, arms whirled through the air and dancers intertwined in intricate couplings. The set resembles a gigantic white box with an open back whose colour changes throughout the show. With no tutu or pair of tights in sight, the dancers wear thin drapes that merge with their own bodies in a world that inhabits a different universe to the ritual formality of "The Sleeping Beauty" or "Don Quixote". But the Moscow dancers and audiences have embraced the work's stark modernity, earning the ballet's creative team a rousing reception at the July 21 premiere. "For the Bolshoi Ballet, 'Chroma' is a breakthrough into a new era," wrote the ballet critic of the Kommersant newspaper Tatyana Kuznetsova. "The troupe has jumped into the 21st century." McGregor, who came to Moscow to rehearse the dancers, expressed amazement at their abilities and is now set to choreograph a new version of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" specially for the Bolshoi in 2013. "It's a fantastic time for the Bolshoi to be experimenting with very modern choreography," said McGregor. "They have these incredible dancers who can really do anything, so why not explore it." "The dancers have great proportions, amazing limbs and they can do extraordinary things with their bodies – they have a real kind of elasticity which is something that I really love." Artem Ovcharenko, one of the soloists in Chroma, said: "You hear the first chords of that music standing in the wings. You start to burn, you want to get on stage and to dance to this." The success of "Chroma" has come at a crucial time for the Bolshoi company which has in recent years been accused of being held back by its own traditions and being afraid of experimentation. It is on October 28 finally to resume performances in its historic theatre which closed in July 2005 for urgent restoration whose completion was embarrassingly put back year after year. In the interim, the company has performed on its New Stage theatre nearby, whose smaller proportions have frustrated some of its stars. The Bolshoi Ballet – run for three decades from its Soviet heyday until 1995 by the authoritarian Yuri Grigorovich – has endured a rocky time since the 2008 departure of modernising director Alexei Ratmansky. Ratmansky left allegedly because he fell out with the pro-Grigorovich old guard and the company appeared to tread water after his departure. This year a top candidate to become the new artistic director became embroiled in a dark campaign to smear him using pornographic images. But the Bolshoi then scored a coup by appointing as ballet director ex-dancer Sergei Filin, who had turned Moscow's Stanislavsky Musical Theatre into a rival of its more famous counterpart by promoting innovative dance. Along with "Chroma", there is a new freshness in the repertoire of the Bolshoi, which has also taken on its first ballet by iconic US choreographer William Forsythe. The one-act "Chroma" is coupled in a thrilling evening of dance with the 1978 "Symphony of Psalms" by Jiri Kylian, another new Bolshoi acquisition, and "Rubies" by George Balanchine, the Russian-born US dancemaker who is only now being re-discovered in his homeland after his death in 1983. "Five years ago it was hard to imagine that the Bolshoi would ever present Forsythe, Kylian or McGregor," wrote critic Anna Galaida in the daily Vedomosti. "Now we have had premieres by all of these stars at the Bolshoi in one season." Meanwhile, the Bolshoi boasts possibly the most sought-after young dancers in ballet in Ivan Vasiliev and Natalya Osipova, a real-life couple who have dazzled the world with their heart-stopping jumps and dizzying spins. Filin said the dancers had initially been nervous of the difficulties of McGregor's choreography but said he had now given the company whole new possibilities. "We got even more than a McGregor ballet. We got artists who are capable of working and delivering a very great result." Traditions, however, are not entirely dead at the Bolshoi. According to the theatre's general director Anatoly Iksanov, the first full-length ballet to go on show at the reopened theatre is to be "The Sleeping Beauty" in an updated production of Grigorovich's Soviet-era version. – AFP Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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