Category: dance

“The organization, which has faced significant financial struggles, announced Tuesday it is looking for its eighth leader in six years. The difference this time, officials say, is that the ballet has reached a more stable financial position – thanks in part to work by Caroline Miller, who after 16 months in the top job, resigned for personal reasons.” (In this case, that’s not a “to spend more time with family” euphemism.)

Steve Zee: “As a dance educator, I also take comfort in the fact that high-quality dance training helps shape students into genuinely good people. … These are the lessons dance teaches that help make students into better humans.”

After Atlanta Ballet’s new artistic director, Gennadi Nedvigin, took over last year, five of the company’s dancers (including one who had applied for Nedvigin’s position) decided to split off and form Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, which gives its first performances this month. “While American ballet tends to emphasize youth and athleticism, [John] Welker and the rest of the Terminus five envisioned a company that would showcase more mature dancers as artists capable of creating nuanced and poignant moments on stage.”

“This summer, it was announced that two American ballet directors would be taking over major international troupes. Septime Webre is headed to Hong Kong Ballet, while Patricia Barker is taking the reins at Royal New Zealand Ballet. We caught up with Webre and Barker to get the scoop on their new posts and what’s coming next.”

Richard Brody picks them: There’s plenty of great dancing in studio-era Hollywood, but the cinematic master of dance is Busby Berkeley, whose career and creativity were at their zenith in the nineteen-thirties and early forties but whose genius reached a latter-day height in the musical “Small Town Girl” (YouTube, Vudu, and Google Play), from 1953.

Let’s be honest: It makes financial sense. “Many European opera and ballet companies already have a similar arrangement. But there are also some significant financial considerations for Lyric and the Joffrey. Opera and ballet each have passionate fan bases but those audiences are shrinking and the costs for each art form are rising sharply.”

Rick Tjia: “Little do the dancers know how many tens of thousands of dancers I have seen and auditioned to get to this moment in time, little do they know the complexities and the enormous number of hours needed to cast one show, much less 22 at the same time – all the time – and counting. Little do they know how much audition ‘success’ is out of their control and how much of it actually is. But they wouldn’t know, and I guess I wouldn’t expect them to. During this wait time the question going through the dancers’ minds is, what is the secret? … There is no mystery, there is no secret.”

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.

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.

“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.”