Ballet leaps into jazz triple bill

Feb 22 2008 By Diane Parkes

DANCERS from Birmingham Royal Ballet bring us the jazz age in a triple bill at Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre next week.

The company, who perform Swan Lake at the theatre until tomorrow night, leap into the 20th and 21st centuries with the works all created by director David Bintley.

The Shakespeare Suite takes some of The Bard's best-known characters for inspiration, setting their experiences alongside music by Duke Ellington.

Hamlet's tormented soliloquies, the love of Romeo for Juliet, the humour of Titania and Bottom, the desperation of an innocent Desdemona before Othello and the fights of Katherine and Petruchio are all recreated in dance.

Bintley also gives a modern twist to the classical tale of Orpheus, who enters the underworld with the aim of bringing his beloved wife Eurydice back from the dead.

In this work, with music commissioned from Colin Towns, Orpheus is the bandleader, the Argonauts are his players and the Furies are their groupies.

Also in the trilogy is a new Bintley work Take Five set to the Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1959 record of the same title, which was the first jazz instrumental to sell more than one million copies.