The Judas Tree (ballet)
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The Judas Tree (ballet)
''The Judas Tree'' is a one-act ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan in 1992 for the Royal Ballet. The music is by Brian Elias. The first performance was on 19 March 1992, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The only clue MacMillan gave in order to understand his intentions is a programme note quoting Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Crime and Punishment": ‘ a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, so the wrongdoer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all’."The Judas Tree". Kenneth MacMillan official Website. According to the information at MacMillan's official website, this ballet is about "betrayal and guilt, individual and communal". The plot references the biblical betrayal story of the Kiss of Judas, which leads directly to the arrest of Jesus and his later crucifixion. In this same source it is said that MacMillan was also thinking of contemporary "instances of betrayal, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989." Sinc ...
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Kenneth MacMillan
Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 192929 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992. From a family with no background of ballet or music, MacMillan was determined from an early age to become a dancer. The director of Sadler's Wells Ballet, Ninette de Valois, accepted him as a student and then a member of her company. In the late 1940s, MacMillan built a successful career as a dancer, but, plagued by stage fright, he abandoned it while still in his twenties. After this he worked entirely as a choreographer; he created ten full-length ballets and more than fifty one-act pieces. In addition to his work for bal ...
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Royal Ballet
The Royal Ballet is a British internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England. The largest of the five major ballet companies in Great Britain, the Royal Ballet was founded in 1931 by Dame Ninette de Valois. It became the resident ballet company of the Royal Opera House in 1946, and has purpose-built facilities within these premises. It was granted a royal charter in 1956, becoming recognised as Britain's flagship ballet company. The Royal Ballet was one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century, and continues to be one of the world's most famous ballet companies to this day, generally noted for its artistic and creative values. The company employs approximately 100 dancers. The official associate school of the company is the Royal Ballet School, and it also has a sister company, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which operates independently. The Prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet is the late Da ...
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Brian Elias
Brian Elias (born 30 August 1948) is a British composer. Biography Brian Elias was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in the U.K. since he was thirteen years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music he undertook private studies with Elisabeth Lutyens. His first major orchestral work ''L'Eylah'' was premiered at the BBC Proms in 1984. He has since had his works performed and recorded extensively by leading orchestras and soloists including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, Jane Manning, Roderick Williams, Natalie Clein, and the Jerusalem Quartet. Elias collaborated with Kenneth MacMillan on his final ballet ''The Judas Tree'', premiered in 1992 at the Royal Opera House. He has won two British Composer Awards - the first for his 2010 work ''Doubles'', and the second for his 2013 work ''Electra Mourns.'' Elias was featured in a Wigmore Hall retrospective in April 2021. He has taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music and the Purcell School, and ...
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Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The first theatre on the site, the Theatre Royal (1732), served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, the first season of operas, by George Frideric Handel, began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there. The current building is the third theatre on the site, following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1856 to previous buildings. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The main auditorium seats 2,256 people, mak ...
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Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London, on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit-and-vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and with the Royal Opera House, itself known as "Covent Garden". The district is divided by the main thoroughfare of Long Acre, north of which is given over to independent shops centred on Neal's Yard and Seven Dials, while the south contains the central square with its street performers and most of the historical buildings, theatres and entertainment facilities, including the London Transport Museum and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The area was fields until briefly settled in the 7th century when it became the heart of the Anglo-Saxon trading town of Lundenwic, then abandoned at the end of the 9th century after which it returned to fields. By 1200 part of it had been walled off by the Abbot of Westminster Abbey for use as arable l ...
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Kahlil Gibran
Gibran Khalil Gibran ( ar, جُبْرَان خَلِيل جُبْرَان, , , or , ; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran (pronounced ), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of '' The Prophet'', which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fif ...
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Kiss Of Judas
The kiss of Judas, also known as the Betrayal of Christ, is the act with which Judas identified Jesus to the multitude with swords and clubs who had come from the chief priests and elders of the people to arrest him, according to the Synoptic Gospels. The kiss is given by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper and leads directly to the arrest of Jesus by the police force of the Sanhedrin. Within the life of Jesus in the New Testament, the events of his identification to hostile forces and subsequent execution are directly foreshadowed both when Jesus predicts his betrayal and Jesus predicts his death. More broadly, a ''Judas kiss'' may refer to "an act appearing to be an act of friendship, which is in fact harmful to the recipient." In Christianity, the betrayal of Jesus is mourned on Spy Wednesday (Holy Wednesday) of Holy Week. In the New Testament Judas was not the only disciple of Jesus but one of twelve Apostles. Most Apostles originated from Galilee b ...
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Jesus
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious leader; he is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Most Christians believe he is the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited Messiah (the Christ) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically. Research into the historical Jesus has yielded some uncertainty on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament reflects the historical Jesus, as the only detailed records of Jesus' life are contained in the Gospels. Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was circumcised, was baptized by John the Baptist, began his own ministry and was often referred to as "rabbi". Jesus debated with fellow Jews on ho ...
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Tiananmen Square Massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth Clearing () or June Fourth Massacre (), troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement () or the Tiananmen Square Incident (). The protests were precipitated by the death of pro-reform Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Hu ...
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West Side Story
''West Side Story'' is a musical conceived by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Inspired by William Shakespeare's play ''Romeo and Juliet'', the story is set in the mid-1950s in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, then a multiracial, blue-collar neighborhood. The musical explores the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. The Sharks, who are immigrants from Puerto Rico, and the Jets, who are white, vie for dominance of the neighborhood, and the police try to keep order. The young protagonist, Tony, a former member of the Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. The dark theme, sophisticated music, extended dance scenes, tragic love story, and focus on social problems marked a turning point in musical theatre. The original 1957 Broadway production, ...
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Irek Mukhamedov
Irek Dzhavdatovich Mukhamedov OBE (russian: Ирек Джавдатович Мухамедов: tt-Cyrl, Ирек Җәүдәт улы Мөхәммәтев; born 8 March 1960), is a Soviet-born British ballet dancer of Tatar origin who has danced with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Royal Ballet. Born in Kazan, he trained at the Moscow Choreographic Institute under the guidance of Alexander Prokofiev between 1970 and 1978. Upon graduation, he joined the Classical Ballet Company, where he spent three years touring around the world. It was with this company that he first danced Romeo, a role that was to become one of his most acclaimed. In 1981 he won the Grand Prix and gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow and was immediately invited to join the Bolshoi Ballet as a principal dancer, where he not only became Grigorovich's favourite danseur but went to become the youngest man ever to dance the leading role in ''Spartacus''. After defecting from the Soviet Union ...
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Viviana Durante
Viviana Durante (born 8 May 1967) is an Italian ballet dancer, considered one of the great dramatic ballerinas of recent times. She was a principal dancer of The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Teatro alla Scala and K-Ballet. She is the artistic director of English National Ballet School and of the Viviana Durante Company. Early career Durante was born in Rome and started ballet there at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma aged six. Spotted by ballerina Galina Samsova, she joined the lower school of the Royal Ballet School at White Lodge in Richmond Park, London. A year later, she featured in a Thames Television documentary entitled ''I really want to dance''. Shortly after graduating to the upper school, aged 17, she joined the Royal Ballet Company. Two years later, she attracted national attention when she took over as Odette/Odile in mid-performance, never having been taught the role. At 21, she became the company's youngest principal dancer, and a year later, in 1990, she ...
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