Canada All-Star Ballet Gala

09/05/2025

04/15/2025

Bravo to Alberta Ballet

Alberta Ballet closes the season with Notre Dame de Paris, a rarely seen masterpiece by Roland Petit.

Alberta Ballet Company dedicated to professional performances.

03/17/2025

Professional review

A daily online publication featuring reviews of past and current arts and culture.

12/04/2024

As a protégé of the legendary Soviet-era ballerina Ekaterina Maximova, Lunkina infused Giselle with a captivating blend of innocence and complexity that made her portrayal compelling. Her coaching by Evelyn Hart, a distinguished ballerina who has also embraced this role, further connected her performance to a lineage of great dancers…

A daily online publication featuring reviews of past and current arts and culture.

11/27/2024

THE POWER OF LOVE
Svetlana Lunkina is by now an expert and veteran Giselle, having danced this role at every stage in her career [around 100 times]. At 18 years old when she first joined the Bolshoi Ballet, she was cast as the tragic heroine and became the youngest Giselle in Bolshoi history. Now at 45, she brings decades of experience to her interpretation.
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“Giselle” The National Ballet of Canada Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts Toronto, Canada Nov. 20, 2024 by Denise Sum copyright © 2024 by Denise Sum The story of “Giselle” hasn’t changed since its premiere in 1841. Today, “Giselle” is all about the performances. There is a r...

11/25/2024

Svetlana Lunkina - Giselle rehearsal with Ekaterina Maximova (1998, Moscow, Bolshoi Theatre).

11/24/2024

This ballet masterpiece DVD can be easily bought on Amazon, and unfortunately, cannot be bought at the NBoC shop

https://www.amazon.ca/Giselle-Bolshoi-Ballet/dp/B0072A4I2W

11/23/2024

highly recommend watching with the volume turned on

11/23/2024

Giselle. Tonight.

Svetlana Lunkina

11/22/2024

Principal dancer Svetlana Lunkina spent 15 years with the Bolshoi Ballet, and at 18, in her first season, was the youngest ballerina in that august company’s history to perform Giselle. According to her online biography, she is now 45, as impossible as that is to believe, and her performance was incandescent.

Giselle has been called the Hamlet of ballet, because of all the role’s demands. In the first act, Giselle is a simple village girl, shy and modest and sweet. When she is betrayed by her lover Albrecht, she goes mad. In the second act, she has risen from her grave, and now floats through the air like an ethereal spirit. The radiant Lunkina was all this and more.

Her mad scene was particularly impressive. Giselle’s choreography mirrors her happy dances with Albrecht, but Lunkina made these repeat steps seem halting and angular, even wild. At one point she hurled herself into the air with very non-ballerina abandon. It certainly took me by surprise, but was, nonetheless, very effective — maybe the best mad scene ever.

In short, Lunkina’s Giselle was perfection.

The National Ballet has mounted a magnificent production of Giselle, and I do not use that word lightly; the National dancers were simply sensational.