(EFE).- The Alicia Alonso International Ballet Festival of Havana held this Wednesday a special gala for classical ballet Giselle, as part of the tributes to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the National Ballet of Cuba (BNC) to be fulfilled in 2023.
This function, the fifth and last of a cycle dedicated to Giselle at the festival, is marked by the return to the stage of the first dancer and director of the BNC, Viengsay Valdés, in the main role of the emblematic work, after an absence of more than two years.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel attended the performance in the Avellaneda Hall of the National Theater in Havana, the main venue for the 27th edition of this ballet event that will end on November 13.
Viengsay Valdés reintroduced the romantic character of the villager willy Giselle, in which she had premiered 25 years ago, accompanied by the Italian dancer Jacopo Tissi, from the La Scala Theater in Milan, as Prince Albrecht.
The director of the Cuban ballet company, the first of its kind in Cuba, highlighted the “alchemy” achieved with her father Tissi, who in a single rehearsal assumed their respective versions
“It has been a long process, but of complete dedication as this career has led, full of sacrifice to maintain excellence on the scene,” Valdés declared about her stage reappearance after an absence due to her motherhood.
The director of the Cuban ballet company, the first of its kind in Cuba, highlighted the “alchemy” achieved with her paternaire Tissi, who in a single rehearsal assumed their respective versions, as well as the changes and suggestions.
He recalled that this season of the piece Giselle has also been performed in tribute to the iconic character of the career of the legendary Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso -who died in 2019-, who performed it for the first time on a day like this but in 1943 with the American Ballet. Theater (ABT), at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
This jewel of dance romanticism tells a love story, inspired by the novel De l’Allemagne, by Heinrich Heine, and the legend of Slavic origin of the willis. The young peasant girl falls in love with Albrecht and dies when she discovers that he is actually a prince already betrothed to the noble Bathilde.
In the previous performances, the leading roles were alternated by the pairs of dancers made up of Yolanda Correa (Cuba) and Semyon Chudin (Russia), the Spaniard Joaquín de Luz and the Russian María Kochetkova, the Cuban Anette Delgado and the Spaniard Ricardo Castellanos, the Italian Sussana Salvi and the Cuban Dani Hernández.
This event is considered among the most traditional and prestigious in dance at the international level and its organizer, the BNC, declared a Cultural Heritage of the Nation in 2018, is listed as the base of the prestigious Cuban School of Ballet.
Since its first edition in 1960, it has been held without competition and every two years. The event that had Alicia Alonso (1920-2019) as its main inspiration and has received great international artists representing the most diverse schools and styles of dance.
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