Category: dance

Pia Catton talks to members of American Ballet Theatre about their reaction to films from The Red Shoes to The Turning Point to Center Stage to (yes) Black Swan.

Lauren Wingenroth: “Hypothetically, this is a great idea. We’re all for more ballet commissions for women. But the way ABT has promoted the initiative is problematic. Part of it is the fact that they plan to provide these women with ‘guidance and feedback from ABT’s artistic staff.’ Though they surely mean for this to be supportive, not condescending, Debra Levine points out … that they wouldn’t dare suggest that male choreographers need ‘guidance and feedback.’ … But what’s really troubling is the way that ABT suggests that they’ve already been doing the work of supporting women, they’ve just now decided to ‘formalize it.'”

Amy Seiwert, who was a Sacramento Ballet dancer for eight years in the 1990s and created a ballet company in San Francisco, will succeed co-artistic directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, a husband-and-wife pair who choreographed performances for 30 years . Seiwert’s term begins July 1.

The standard devices of the traditional ballets can read as so many clichés. In multiple ballets, for example, those companions surround their heroes and heroines with dancing entourages: The heroine often has six or eight female companions known as “little friends.” But don’t knock them! Those companions take the heroine’s feminine spirit and fill the stage with it.

In what seems to be an attempt to calm the tensions caused by the (let’s say) fraught departure of Peter Martins, City Ballet’s search committee is conducting an extensive “listening tour,” talking with dancers, staff, donors, and board members about what they’d like to see in a new artistic director and in the direction of the company.

“Pennsylvania Ballet, which long planned to renovate a white terracotta-clad building on its property at North Broad and Carlton Streets as part of its expansion a few blocks north of City Hall, now says it will demolish the building instead. … The troupe says it has determined that keeping the historic four-story building fronting Broad Street isn’t feasible.”

“Choreographer Kim Brandstrup’s new work was inspired by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th-century play [Life is a Dream] about a prince imprisoned in a tower by his father. … Inspired by the play’s themes of ‘the longing for authentic experience, and the need to dream’, the Olivier-winning choreographer has transposed the action to a rundown 1959 rehearsal room.” (photo journal)

“I am trained in the classical Indian dance of Kathak, a tradition passed on through non-technological means, carried in the memory, the body and the mind. So each time we share it, it’s evolving. It’s like telling a story – no one ever tells it the same way twice. It changes each time you tell it, because you are human, because you are alive. By contrast, digital preservation of work and its perfect, infinite reproducibility – freed of context – potentially creates a more sterile transmission mechanism for ideas and art.”

The cases of Peter Martins and Marcelo Gomes are the only ones from the dance world to have hit the national media in the #MeToo era, and the movement’s momentum seems to have faded in the field seems to have dissipated. “[Yet] we’ve barely scratched the surface of the dance world’s harassment problem. One reason why: The same culture that makes harassment possible in dance makes it uniquely difficult for artists to speak up,” writes Lauren Wingenroth in an essay exploring the issue.

Scott Gormley, filmmaker and dance dad: “I’ve spent the last two years creating a documentary about the struggles that young men face when they choose to dance ballet ― when they choose to thumb their nose at what boys ‘should do.’ … What I found the most upsetting were the attacks that came directly from family members: fathers, stepfathers, uncles, brothers, many of whom feared that ballet would ‘turn’ boys gay.”