Ballet returns to the Palau de les Arts with Carlos Acosta and The Royal Ballet

The Minister of Education, Alejandro Font de Mora, highlighted today that "one in 20 students in the Valencian Community have been able to enjoy the educational activities offered by the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía."

Valencia (April 22, 2009) – Ballet returns to the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía tomorrow, Thursday, April 23, at 8:00 p.m., with Carlos Acosta and The Royal Ballet (Guest Artists) following its critical and popular success last season. The world-renowned Cuban star will display her elegance and captivating presence on the stage of the Main Hall of the Valencian arts center in a performance that can also be enjoyed on April 24, 26, 27, and 28.

Carlos Acosta, considered by the specialized press as the “successor to Nureyev” and the “new Nijinsky,” along with Guest Artists from The Royal Ballet—the UK’s premier ballet company, based at London’s Covent Garden—will present a performance featuring choreographies by leading figures in modern dance such as Jerome Robbins, Ben Stevenson, Kenneth MacMillan, and George Balanchine. In the pit, Paul Murphy, music director of the Royal Ballet Birmingham, will conduct the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana.

Acosta himself, along with Begoña Cao, will open the evening with Afternoon of a Faun, a version by American film director and choreographer Jerome Robbins of the original Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Vaslav Nijinski, with music by Claude Debussy; a piece consolidated within the repertoire of modern American ballet.

It will be followed by a pas de deux from End of Time, with choreography by Ben Stevenson and music by Sergei Rachmaninoff (Sonata in G minor for cello and piano, opus 19), which portrays the search for survival of the last man and the last woman alive on Earth, played by Hikaru Kobayashi and Arionel Vargas.

The third piece on the program will be Manon, one of the Royal Ballet's signature works, created by Kenneth MacMillan. It portrays the decline of the famous character—created in 1731 by Abbé Prévost—from Parisian courtesan to fugitive in the Louisiana swamps, set to music from Jules Massenet's opera of the same name. This pas de deux, danced by Carlos Acosta as Des Grieux and Marianela Núñez as Manon Lescaut, is a ballet that has garnered both critical and popular acclaim since its premiere in 1974.

Apollon Musagète, a ballet in two acts composed between 1927 and 1928 by Igor Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes, will be the piece with which Carlos Acosta and the Guest Artists of The Royal Ballet will conclude the performance. This work features choreography by George Balanchine, who stripped the original of its classical aesthetic and formal air to conceive a young and wild Apollo (Carlos Acosta), representing the exaltation of masculine dance.