Popular family ballets Peter And The Wolf, Tales Of Beatrix Potter and Faeries are among the delights returning to the Royal Opera House stage over the Christmas 2010 season.
Set to Prokovfiev’s famous score and choreographed by Matthew Hart, Peter And The Wolf follows the attempts of Peter and his animal friends to capture the big bad wolf.
The famous characters Mrs Tiggywinkle, Squirrel Nutkin, Jeremy Fisher and many others are brought to life in Tales Of Beatrix Potter, based on the popular children’s picture books. As last year, the piece is once again partnered with Les Patineurs, Frederick Ashton’s ballet set during an Edwardian skating party under a snowy winter’s dusk.
In the Linbury Studio, Faeries, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in summer 2008, returns to the programme this festive season. Choreographed and directed by Will Tuckett, it uses dance, storytelling and puppetry to tell Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s World War II set drama about a young girl and her twilight adventures in Kensington Park. With a cast of sprites and fairies hovering between the London park’s lakes and monuments, she discovers not only that fairies really do exist but they are rarely how we imagine them.
Other productions suitable for family audiences this year include Ashton’s version of the classic fairytale Cinderella, which opens in November. Anthony Dowell’s production of Swan Lake, the enduring story of a princess turned into a swan by an evil magician, opens in January 2011.
The Christmas season is followed, in February 2011, by a brand new ballet based on Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s story Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.
CB