Category: dance

“Pavel V. Dmitrichenko, the dancer released from prison after being convicted of engineering an acid attack that exposed the hidden intrigues of the Bolshoi Ballet, asked to meet outside the theater where he had so spectacularly fallen from grace, and where he already envisions his return. With the famous facade glowing pink in the soft light of a summer evening, Mr. Dmitrichenko looked around and pronounced himself entirely at home.”

Joan Acocella: “What a trick! To get the foremost male ballet dancer of the late twentieth century to portray the foremost male ballet dancer of the early twentieth century. In fact, a drama about Nijinsky’s madness would not require a great classical virtuoso. What it would need is an actor-dancer of extreme subtlety, which is what Baryshnikov, in his late-sixties, had become.”

The Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, a school whose history goes back to 1738, has announced that it will open a branch in Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East – in part to train dancers for the Mariinsky’s Vladivostok outpost, which was established at the beginning of this year.

“Sir Peter Wright, the leading producer-choreographer, … now aged 90 and still working, … is publishing a memoir that will reveal the extreme tensions and rivalries between some of the most brilliant but often highly strung artists.” For instance, he remembers Rudolf Nureyev being “unbearably rude” to Margot Fonteyn, who “would just shrug her shoulders.”

Artem Ovcharenko: “I was very keen, not just to play him correctly, but also to dance like him, but without making it a caricature. If you look at the way he was dancing in his younger days, people were already saying that he was a genius on stage – but technically bad. But I feared that if I simply emphasised that, it would be too obvious.”

“There is an implacable confidence about [Makhar] Vaziev – and it is warranted. No artistic director could have been better prepared to take on the treacherous politics of the Bolshoi: Vaziev has made a long career out of steering some of the most complex, unruly ballet companies in the world, from the Mariinsky Ballet to Milan’s La Scala.”

Says one company principal, “I’d say Makhar Vaziev is lifting the classical level of the troupe. … There wasn’t this type of discipline in the past … I see now that people are really trying hard, the halls have stopped being almost empty as they were before. Now everyone is trying to prepare something and to show something.”

“Xiomara Reyes will head The Washington School of Ballet, effective September 1. The move marks Kent’s first staff appointment. Reyes will take the place of revered teacher Kee Juan Han (who famously trained David Hallberg) and who announced his retirement in late April. … We spoke with Reyes about the vision she and Kent share, her Cuban roots, relocating to DC and more.”

“A few days before Ryan McNamara’s performance piece Battleground premièred at the Guggenheim, last month, his cast of nine dancers had clocked an impressive six hundred and fifty hours of rehearsal. Unfortunately, they’d practiced together for only one of them. That might have caused most choreographers to panic, but McNamara isn’t a choreographer, he’s a performance artist, and fragmentation is kind of his thing.”

“Harefield hospital in London is giving some of its patients a taste of Bollywood and classical Indian dance – and the results are apparently proving helpful to health.”