Ballet Vermont grew out of the Farm to Ballet project (agriculture-themed dance on local farms) that got some media attention two summers ago; artistic director Chatch Pregger now plans to make the endeavor more firmly established and permanent. Yet there are no plans for a home base: Ballet Vermont will continue to perform around the state, often outdoors.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Even Though He’s Stepping Down As Its Boss, Julio Bocca Wants Uruguay’s National Ballet To Be A World-Beater
The Ballet Nacional Sodre in Montevideo has been making strides and leaps (ahem) since the former international star, a native of neighboring Argentina, became director of the company in 2010. The announcement that he’s resigning as director made news in South America last month, but he’s not actually leaving the company: he’ll focus solely on training its dancers.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.28.17
CultureGrrl Video: My Opinionated Tour of the Embattled Berkshire Museum
Having written extensively and critically about the Berkshire Museum’s deaccession plans, I thought I ought to revisit that embattled institution in person. I’d been there twice before, decades ago, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-09-27
Deciphering Codes, Or Not
Sarah Michelson premieres a new work at Bard College’s Richard B. Fisher Center.
If a friend tells me he or she is going to see a particular choreographer’s new work, I nod my head; I have a vague idea of what it’ll be like. But suppose the choreographer named is Sarah Michelson. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2017-09-28
Can’t anyone here …
Early this month I got crazy email from the Met Opera. They were promoting their new season, opening with a new production of Bellini’s Norma. … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2017-09-28
Other Matters – Language: So …
Increasingly, radio and television newscasts include stories in which anchors interview correspondents in the field. That is part of a pattern: reduced news budgets, smaller staffs and greater dependence on the survivors … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-09-28
Meet New York City Ballet’s Youngest Choreographer in History
“School of American Ballet graduate and Ballet Semperoper Dresden apprentice Gianna Reisen” – age 18 – “makes her first-ever work for New York City Ballet this season. Reisen began studying at SAB in 2010 and first participated in SAB’s Student Choreography Workshop as a choreographer in 2015. She also choreographed for the New York Choreographic Institute, an affiliate of NYCB, during the fall 2016 working session.”
An Artist Whose Medium Is Sandcastles
A reporter visits Rockaway Beach in Queens to meet Calvin Seibert, who creates his modernist edifices on New York City’s beaches and displays them on a popular Instagram account.
Legendary Samurai ‘Macbeth’ Production Returns After More Than Three Decades
“When it visited the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, this Macbeth” – staged by the revered Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa with his company, Saitama Arts Theater – “was declared an ‘overnight legend’, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty.” Saitama has now prepared a touring revival, which is coming to Britain next month, and, writes Andrew Dickson, it “still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.”
At The International Championship Of A Cappella
Jon Caramanca checks out the finals at Carnegie Hall: “There were groups striving to make a cappella their lives, groups that formed as passion projects and groups that seemed intent on dismantling the a cappella establishment from within by taking advantage of the competition’s open format to import styles of singing you won’t see at most college pre-frosh weekends. At times, and especially during the awards portion of the evening, that made for a confusing mandate, with global folk songs pitted against choral lite-gospel, and smarmy pop-rock alongside the familiar complex multipart vocal harmonizing (with vocal percussion!) that is a cappella’s public face.”
America’s Great Dictionary Of Regional Dialects To Shut Down
The six-volume-plus-online-updates Dictionary of American Regional English, the only project of its type based on in-person field research, was supported largely by grants from the likes of the NEH and the National Science Foundation. “The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize.” Jesse Sheidlower offers a eulogy.
Zuzana Růžičková, Harpsichordist Who Survived Three Nazi Camps, Dead At 90
Despite suffering damage to her hands during her Nazi ordeal as well as discrimination from Czech Communist authorities who considered her instrument a feudal and bourgeois relic, she went on to become a celebrated international soloist and the first musician to record J.S. Bach’s complete keyboard music on harpsichord.
Letter That Inspired Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ Reaches Its Final Destination
The 16,000-word, 19-page (single-spaced!) letter that Neal Cassady sent to Jack Kerouac in 1950 – and which, as reporter Jennifer Schuessler puts it, was “(allegedly) dropped off a houseboat, misfiled at a small Bay Area publisher, nearly tossed out with the trash, and then fought over by two literary estates’ – has ended up in Emory University Library’s Beat collection.