Category: dance

Dancers working for English National Opera are calling for an overhaul of pay conditions, claiming their rate of less than £10 an hour is “disrespectful and absurd”.

With relatively stable finances, recent artistic successes and artistic directorships to fill, West Australian Ballet and Queensland Ballet have plans to raise their game by hiring more dancers, doing more touring in their regions and (if possible) overseas, and performing innovative choreography that keeps them from looking like mini-mes of the Australian Ballet.

“Being on the road a lot, going across the country every two years to so many different places makes us unique in that there is a real kind of rugged quality – and I mean that in the best possible sense. … [My] dancers here deliver first-class performances in sometimes less-than-ideal conditions, and that’s something that makes me proud.”

“Founded nearly 70 years ago by the husband and wife team of Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili and initially named the Georgian State Dance Company, the troupe” – currently called the Georgian National Ballet and not to be confused with Nina Ananiashvili’s State Ballet of Georgia – “has travelled from the back offices of suspicious state and party officials in 1945 to some of the greatest stages in the world.”

“The Mikhailovsky Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, scored a coup last fall by luring two of ballet’s biggest stars” – Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev – “from the Bolshoi, and it was to have brought them to the United States this summer for a run of shows at Lincoln Center. But those plans have been scrapped … because American Ballet Theater exercised a no-compete clause involving those very same dancers.”

“The ballet company at Milan’s famous La Scala opera house fought back Wednesday, after one of their leading dancers was fired for giving interviews in which she said the industry has an anorexia problem. … ‘There is no anorexia emergency, and whoever is part of our world knows that well,’ said the company.”

“The Class would be a school for boys aged 11 to 16, located in London … [where] every pupil will take daily ballet classes as well as trying other dance classes across the week and studying an English Baccalaureate-style curriculum.”

“Ballerinas used to be plump by modern standards; indeed, the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova was criticised in the late 1890s for being too thin (mocked for her long, slender limbs, she was nicknamed ‘the broom’ by fellow students).” My, how things have changed. (Might Balanchine bear a bit of the blame?)

Anouk van Dijk doesn’t officially start her new job – replacing founder Gideon Obarzanek at the helm of Melbourne’s top modern dance company – until July, but she’s already in town off and on, auditioning dancers and making plans.