The second is the latest piece, Solea, a pas de deux with his sister Carmen, created by flamenco choreographer and dancer Maria Pages for a premiere at New York City Center last March.
Pages created it to combine ballet with flamenco music’s complex rhythms and vocals. “I find combinations of flamenco and classical ballet to be highly interesting with enormous potential to enrich both forms of dance,” Pages says.
The piece will be Corella’s first performance with his sister, although the two have danced independently for more than 20 years. “Carmen is really tall, so Pages wanted to use us because of the physical similarity and the similarity of our approach,” he says.
If Corella is the most demanded male dancer, then Russian-born Polina Semionova is the top ballerina.
The 26-year-old star joined the Staatsballet Berlin as a principal dancer when she was 17. She is regarded as a prima ballerina and is one of the youngest dancers to achieve this kind of recognition.
Even as a teen she had clear goals for her ballet career. When Vladimir Malakhov, the artistic director of Staatsballet Berlin, offered her a corps de ballet position, she rejected it. “If it had been a choice between the Bolshoi/Mariinsky corps de ballet and the Berlin corps de ballet, I would have taken the Bolshoi/Mariinsky offer,” Semionova says in the preview interview with The Ballet Bag.
After turning down Malakhov’s contract, he gave her the chance to join his company as a first soloist. “He believed in me more than I believed in myself. I’m thankful for that, because it is important to have someone (like that) in the beginning of my career giving me this chance,” she says.
Semionova is not only a gifted dancer, but also a social media phenomenon. Her appearance in Herbert Groenemeyer’s video “Last Day” made her a big hit on YouTube, and she has 40,000 fans in her Facebook page.
A biography of her young life is being published by German writer Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg. The book focuses on the first half of her career. Haase-Hindenberg travels with her when she is on tour, and in Berlin they meet two to three times per week for two hours.
“At first I was a little bit skeptical, as I thought it would be better to do this when I was older, but then it brought back so many memories,” she says. “I remembered some very nice times and also more challenging times, the time when I grew up and what my family went through. It is nice to be pushed to remember all of these things.”
At the gala, she will dance two pas de deux pieces with her elder brother Dmitry Seminov.
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