By Naomi Mori The National Ballet of Japan’s commission to British choreographer Will Tuckett, a one-act Shakespearean ballet titled The Tragedy of Macbeth, premiered in April at New National Theatre. The score, by the late Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha, Macbeth, had been created as ballet music but had never been used in a ballet performance.
By Naomi Mori Tokyo City Ballet’s Swan Lake is noteworthy for the stage design by École de Paris painter Léonard Foujita, who created it for the first ever Japanese production of Swan Lake in 1946, for Tokyo Ballet (not the same company that is currently active) when Tokyo was still in the aftermath of World
When Makhar Vaziev took over the Bolshoi last year, he declared that classical ballet was and will always remain the company’s lifeline. And so it was when the Bolshoi toured to Japan in June, where a program of classics — Giselle, Swan Lake and Flames of Paris — dominated over 12 days of performances at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan concert hall. In Giselle, when Evgenia Obraztsova runs, her body