Valerio Palumbo – Landgraf on Dance

“Romeo and Juliet”
Hungarian National Ballet
Hungarian State Opera
Budapest, Hungary
November 8-9, 2025 (evening performance and matinee)

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Landgraf

Most ballet companies have a version of Romeo and Juliet. The Hungarian National Ballet’s version, by László Seregi (1929-2012), has been on the program regularly since its premiere in 1985. A crowd puller, the opera house was sold out at both performances I watched.

Seregi’s name is well known to Hungarian ballet lovers. Initially trained as a folk dancer, he joined the opera’s corps de ballet when it was short on artists during the 1956 revolution. In 1977, he became the company’s director but, feeling burdened by his duties, suffered from an enduring artistic crisis. Continue reading “Applied Faith”

“The Pygmalion Effect”
Hungarian National Ballet
Hungarian State Opera
Budapest, Hungary
June 01, 2024 (matinee)

Boris Eifman’s The Pygmalion Effect took my breath away. The dancers of the Hungarian National Ballet whizzed through two, at times terrifically fast, acts and then appeared at the curtain call as if they had merely finished warming up. Hats off! Budapest’s audience has loved the ballet, which was created for Eifman’s home company in St. Petersburg in 2019 and has been in the Hungarian National Ballet’s repertory since June 2023. At Saturday’s matinee, the house was packed to the roof.

Greek mythology has two Pygmalions; one was the son of King Belus of Tyros, and the other is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and was a sculptor who fell in love with his creation. This creation—a statue of a woman who was later called Galatea—subsequently came to life. Eifman took inspiration from Ovid’s Pygmalion and the so-called Pygmalion Effect, a psychological phenomenon that was observed in classrooms showing that a teacher’s anticipated judgments about students will cause them to become true. Continue reading “At a Gallop”