Category: dance

“Soon after becoming the ballet director at the Bolshoi Theater, Makhar K. Vaziev installed a large flat-screen television next to his desk that allows him to monitor the rehearsal rooms and the two main stages – the screen divided into nine squares. On a recent afternoon, … he watched as Elvina Ibraimova rehearsed onscreen, then called the studio to tweak a variation. … At first, the dancers and ballet teachers were startled at this Big Brother method of remote supervision, he said, but he seems to want them to know that he is always there.”

“It’s difficult to imagine a Batsheva Dance Company without Ohad Naharin at the helm. The provocative choreographer has been the Israeli troupe’s artistic director since 1990, during which time the company, its lead choreographer and his movement language, Gaga, have become more or less synonymous. But changes are afoot. Batsheva quietly announced on its website this weekend that Naharin will be stepping down from his post as artistic director in September 2018.”

The City of Light is the first stop of a European tour. But “while the Alvin Ailey dancers perform nightly to urbane audiences at a concert hall on the western edge of Paris, another scene unfolds during the day across town at the Georges Bizet public conservatory.”

Judith Mackrell gives us a brief 200-year history.

In January, the company’s board of directors decided not to renew the contracts of Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, who had led Sacramento Ballet for three decades and developed it into a fully professional outfit. They’re being replaced, as of next season, by Amy Seiwert, who spent most of the 1990s dancing in the company under Cunningham and Binda.

Each of the ballet’s sections is said to represent one of the art form’s great stylistic schools: French (“Emeralds”), American (“Rubies”) and Russian (“Diamonds”). Marina Harss talks with stars from the companies that embody those schools – the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, and the Bolshoi Ballet – about Jewels, which they’ll be performing together at this year’s Lincoln Center Festival.

“Just days after the Bolshoi called off the premiere, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency quoted an unidentified ‘source’ as saying that Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky ordered the show postponed because it may constitute gay ‘propaganda’ [under a notorious] 2013 law.”

“I’ve been strapped in – physically strapped into pointe shoes, strapped into a leotard and tights, my hair’s been strapped up – for my whole entire life. … I was terrified to be unconstricted, and now I don’t know another way I’d rather be.” (audio)

“When invited by the Joyce Theater to return to its Ballet Festival, a biennial event spotlighting independent and emerging ballet choreographers, [Emery LeCrone] thought back to the 2015 festival when her troupe made its Joyce debut, performing for two nights. Despite selling out both shows, she came out of that experience in a state of what she calls ‘burnout, completely.'” Happily, “financially, this time is different.”

Aurélie Dupont: “Normally when you’re a ballet dancer, you do not ever show the effort when you dance, so you never breathe. Because breathing means that you need air, and if you need air that’s not good, and, anyway, you never learn how to breathe in school. Never.” Reporter Gia Kourlas talks with Dupont, former étoile and current director at the world’s oldest and most august ballet company, and choreographer Saburo Teshigawara.