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National Ballet Britain - The Great Gatsby

Date: Feb 3-5 - 7:30 pm+

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 220-1,200 yuan

A new full-length story ballet based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, choreographed by David Nixon, is the perfect project for this energetic, enthusiastic ensemble - the characters are strong, the locations distinctive, the atmosphere unforgettable. But Gatsby adaptations are tricky to pull off - witness the ambivalence attending the release of Baz Luhrmann's new movie version - at least in part because the novel, despite its obviously filmic qualities, actually derives much of its effect from an intense evocation of the intangible and invisible: moods, feelings, suspicions. Moreover, the characters are hard-to-nail cocktails of mannerisms, some of which - like Daisy's murmur - cannot be translated into dance.