Kim Brandstrup studied film at the University of Copenhagen and choreography with Nina Fonaroff at the London Contemporary Dance School.
Kim Brandstrup has worked as a choreographer since 1983 and in 1985 founded his own dance company, ARC. Works he has created for ARC have toured the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Spain and Mexico. ARC brought Hamletto Helsingør in 2003 and Anatomy of a Storyteller, based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen, to Copenhagen in 2005.
In the fall of 2007, Mr. Brandstrup worked with the Brothers Quay (Stephen and Timothy Quay), Ms. Yanovsky and baritone Simon Keenlyside on She, So Beloved, a combination of film, dance, music and visual art created at the Leeds City Art Gallery to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.
His newer work, Rushes, a one-act ballet created for London's Royal Ballet, premiered in April 2008. Rushes is set to Prokofiev's score for The Queen of Spades, a film planned but never made by Russian director Mikhail Romm. Other works include Theme and Inversion (2005), a duet for the White Christmas event at The Place, London; Songs of a Wayfarer, created for the Rambert Dance Company and presented at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival prior to touring the U.K. (fall 2004, spring 2005 and 2006); The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, a feature film with the Brothers Quay; and Afsked (2003) a duet with Ms. Yanovsky and Dylan Elmore created for the gala evening Out of Denmark, held at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and also staged in Bucharest.
Mr. Brandstrup also created In Place of Stone for the Norwegian National Ballet and Sleeping Beauty for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. In 2007, he choreographed Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice (directed by Deborah Warner) for the English National Opera. The production will be revived in Brussels and Luxembourg in 2009 before going on to the United States. In 2009, he will also choreograph a new production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen (directed by Jonathan Kent), which will stage at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and in Paris.
Mr. Brandstrup's productions include the Kurt Weill opera Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed and directed for the National Opera of Greece in 2007; Ghosts, a one-act ballet created for the Royal Danish Ballet in 2007; The Fall of the House of Usher, a collaboration with Phyllida Lloyd for the 2006 Bregenz Festival that combined the unfinished opera by Debussy with two choreographies,* L'après-midi d'un faune* and Jeux; Pulcinella (2006), directed for the Birmingham Royal Ballet; White Lead(2005), choreographed for the Royal Swedish Ballet; and Two Footnotes to Ashton (2005). The latter, comprising a solo for Zenaida Yanovsky and duet for Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg (all three of whom are star dancers with London's Royal Ballet), was choreographed for the Royal Opera House and has since been staged at gala events in Russia, New York and Bucharest.
