$15 Student Matinee Tickets
For only $15 a ticket your students can experience the splendour of the ballet! We will help you incorporate ballet into the curriculum with a study guide for the ballet upon your purchase.
Reserve your seats beginning September 10, 2019 by calling 416 (1 866) 345 9595.
Phone lines open at 11:00 am
Don't miss out!
Schedule of performances:
Giselle
Created during the great Romantic era of ballet, Giselle premiered at Paris Opéra Ballet on June 28, 1841. A haunting tale of love, betrayal and forgiveness, that encapsulates the sensibility of Romanticism. Giselle is the story is of a young peasant girl who is overcome with grief and madness by her lover’s deception. Upon her death, she is transported into the ghostly world of the Wilis, the spirits of betrayed young women.
The title role has always been a touchstone and a proving ground for the world’s greatest prima ballerinas, not simply for the enormous technical demands the choreography poses, but for the intensity and depth of emotional commitment that it requires. The work also affords the Corps de Ballet the opportunity to shine, with the ghostly diagonal procession of the Wilis remaining one of the most haunting moodily evocative images in all of ballet.
Thursday November 7, 2019 at 2:00 pm
Recommended grades: 7 to 12
More information on Giselle
World Premiere
New Work by Crystal Pite & Chroma & Marguerite and Armand
Crystal Pite, the choreographer of Emergence, creates a brand-new work for The National Ballet of Canada to premiere in March 2020. One of the world’s most in-demand dance artists, the British Columbia-born choreographer has astonished and enthralled audiences both at home and abroad with her nuanced, thematically provocative and often haunting work. A world premiere by this enormously gifted artist will be one of the most highly-anticipated events of the 2019/20 season.
Wayne McGregor has created some of the most intellectually challenging and visually ravishing dance works of recent decades. Chroma is a stunning example of his artistry, questioning the very nature of choreographed movement and infusing each moment with an utterly unique and surprising gestural vocabulary.
Frederick Ashton created Marguerite and Armand for Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in 1963 as a celebration of their unique dance partnership. Set to Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, the narrative was inspired by the famous novel La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. In his ballet, Ashton concentrates on the tragic life of Parisian courtesan Marguerite and her ill-fated love for the young Armand. Nureyev and Fonteyn last danced the celebrated work in 1973 and it was not danced again until 2000. Rarely performed, the ballet features two of the most dramatically intense roles in the ballet canon and has been danced by some of the world’s most celebrated dancers.
More information
Thursday March 5, 2020 at 2:00 pm
Recommended grades: 9 to 12
Romeo and Juliet
Created to celebrate The National Ballet of Canada’s 60th anniversary in 2011, Alexei Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet is a brilliantly imagined interpretation of Shakespeare’s tender and tragic tale of two young lovers and the warring households that keep them apart.
Known especially for his mastery of the classical idiom, Ratmansky is equally adept at employing that idiom for fresh, contemporary effects. Full of bold and emotionally vivid characterization and taking full advantage of the play’s rich theatrical possibilities, Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet finds a natural home in Prokofiev’s famous and achingly affecting score, a work that provides the perfect underpinning for this landmark version of Shakespeare’s timeless, universal tale of youthful, ill-starred love.
Thursday March 12, 2020 at 2:00 pm
Recommended grades: 7 to 12
More information on Romeo and Juliet
World Premiere
Swan Lake
To mark her 50th anniversary with The National Ballet of Canada, Artistic Director Karen Kain directs and stages a new production of one of classical ballet’s most seminal and revered works, Swan Lake. Basing her new approach on Erik Bruhn’s landmark version of the ballet, a version she performed to unforgettable acclaim as a dancer, Kain accentuates the romantic core of the ballet and the love story that provides it with its powerful emotional life and which has made the work the enduring classic that it has been for generations of audiences.
With stunning new sets and costumes by renowned designer Gabriela Týlešová, this fresh and vibrant staging of Swan Lake retains all of the mystery, tragic feeling and rich psychological undercurrents that form such an inextricable part of the ballet’s thematic texture. It also brings its symbolic elements to fuller dramatic life through attentive characterization and an unerring evocation of the inner power and radiance of its narrative and choreography. A fitting celebration of a great ballet and a tribute to and from one of Canadian ballet’s greatest artists.
Thursday June 11, 2020 at 2:00 pm
Recommended grades: 7 to 12
More information on Swan Lake
Reserve your seats by calling 416 (1 866) 345 9595, beginning September 10, 2019.
Phone lines open at 11:00 am
Don't miss out!