A fairy tale come true
This first performance by the Joburg Ballet (until recently the South African Mzanzi Ballet) underlined the potential difference the newly realised funding from the City of Johannesburg the reason for the company's name change could make.
Picture: Tracy Lee Stark.
This newly available cash means the dancers can rely on their salaries, as opposed to hopefully getting paid, which frees up the company to expand its vision and bring local ballet fans new and exciting projects.
This is a fresh, re-imagined Cinderella, choreographed to the music of Johann Strauss rather than the traditional Sergei Prokofiev soundtrack. Iain MacDonald expands his portfolio brilliantly in this area, taking disparate parts of Strauss’s compositions and rearranging them to suit new ideas MacDonald came up with to make the best use of his dancers’ abilities and the Joburg Theatre’s high-tech stage, which features sections that can be raised and lowered independently.
Audiences can watch two separate scenes at once Cinderella and her basement-dwelling friends, the mice, dancing at the front of the stage, and the ugly sisters (Luis de Castro and Carlos Santos, both hamming it up delightfully) getting changed into their frocks on a raised platform further back. The presence of details like the mice is clever, as it links the classical ballet to other well-known versions of the ancient folktale, such as the animated Disney film.
Burnise Silvius was superb in the title role, able to communicate her character’s insecurity when shunned by her family, as well as undiluted elegance when in her element at the King’s (Michael Revie in a jolly fatsuit) ball.
Jonathan Rodrigues as The Prince started slowly, but his powerful physical presence was soon matched by equally arresting movement.
In the scenes in which the whole company is involved, such as the ball and the wedding, MacDonald has included a hefty quota of lifts, requiring a great deal of skill from the dancers, who are more than up to the task.
