From Giselle to Swan Lake, Patricia Crosbie picks her five favourite ballets
Patricia Crosbie. Picture: Des Barry
Patricia Crosbie is delivering a free six-week course called 'Tea and Ballet’ in association with the Firkin Crane in Cork. Particularly aimed at people over the age of 55, as part of the new Cork Cultural Companions project, it aims to break down any barriers to appreciating ballet.
A former principal ballerina with London Ballet Theatre and currently ballet mistress with Cork City Ballet, Crosbie will explore some world-famous classical ballets. The first series will focus on the ballet Giselle. Here, Crosbie reveals her five favourite ballets.
"My favorite ballet of all time is the classical ballet Giselle and it actually is one that I have chosen to talk about in Tea & Ballet. For me, it ticks all the boxes. It's got everything in it: love, innocence, betrayal, revenge, but also feminism. This ballet first premiered in 1841, it was the Industrial Revolution and people were becoming very scientific. This ballet, along with a few others at the time, was one of the romantic ballets, a break away from science. It's only a two-act ballet so it's one of the shorter ones, but it just packs it all in.
"Also for the ballerina, you really have to be able to act because her character actually goes mad. For me it’s an all-rounder, I just love it. I would have loved to dance the main role because there’s so much acting going on but it wasn’t to be."
"I think everybody knows Swan Lake but again there's just so many underlying things that go on there. I did actually dance that role many years ago. It is technically one of the hardest roles for a ballerina to dance. You have the White Swan who represents good and you have the Black Swan which represents evil. Nowadays the same ballerina dances both roles.
"There was a time, many years ago, where you had two ballerinas but now it's the same ballerina dances both roles so it's technically one of the hardest and most difficult to do. You also have to be able to act and perform. It's beautiful. Everybody knows Tchaikovsky's music for ballets, that's one of his best, I believe. For me, the corps de ballet work is stunning and the choreography for the time, I think, is just amazing.
"I’m going back to Giselle but it’s an updated version that was choreographed in 2016 by Akram Khan for the English National Ballet. They brought it to Dublin in 2018 and I went to the Bord Gais Theatre to see it. I'd heard about how unique it was and I have to say, I was absolutely blown away by it. It was stunning. It was brought to a different era and a different time but still using the same storyline.
"His interpretation of Act 2, where those girls are evil, was absolutely breathtaking, very different from the original. I wasn't expecting it. He retained a lot of the original music from Giselle but he also slowed it down and brought in different types of music. Some people I know hated it but I think that often happens with some of the classics. Some people just don't like them to be messed around with. Sometimes it doesn’t work but for me, I loved it."
"Sleeping Beauty is one of my favourites, for all the reasons that I think everybody loves it. It's a classic and it's one of the best loved fairy tales. It's good versus evil, everybody lives happily ever after. For that pure, ‘get away from it all’ feeling, there’s something about Sleeping Beauty. It’s a feelgood ballet.
"I think Tchaikovsky excelled himself with the music, especially in the last act, with the wedding pas de deux you can just close your eyes and drift away. That’s what’s so great about theatre and at the moment what we’re all missing is both the escapism but also being able to see what we're going through now portrayed in different ways."
"I’m cheating. It’s not a full ballet, it's a pas de deux taken from a ballet that’s not very well known. I've never even seen it myself. It‘s a ballet called Flames of Paris. It was done in Russia in the 1930s, and it's a four-act ballet about the Russian Revolution. Within that, there’s a pas de deux that I adore. When I was dancing in the Irish National Ballet, back in the 1970s, which was based in Cork, that was in the rep. I was an apprentice at the time so I never got to perform it, but I learned it and it was just something that stayed with me.
"In 2012 I was lucky enough to be in St Petersburg, and I went to see a performance and one of the pas de deuxs in it was Flames of Paris and it was danced by two dancers from Russia. It's just breathtaking. It's something I would have loved to have danced in my day."
- For details of the free ballet appreciation course, see www.muintircork.com or www.firkincrane.ie.
