Category: dance

“Being at the Bolshoi means being caught up in politics. The problem is that both the Bolshoi and the Kirov are considered Russian institutions – and to Russians, our classical ballets are the most important tradition. For example, very few Bolshoi dancers attend performances of visiting companies. When I brought in great coaches and teachers, the Bolshoi ballet masters wouldn’t come to watch. I left because there was too much pressure to stick to a narrow horizon.”

“After more than a week of turmoil surrounding leadership of its renowned ballet troupe,” Russia’s flagship theater has turned to a former principal dancer, Sergei Filin, who has revitalized the ballet company at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater over the past three seasons.

“John Scott studied with the legendary Living Theater founders Judith Malina and Julian Beck. … Earlier, he had taken a stab at a ballet career, apprenticing with Dublin City Ballet, before founding his own company, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, in 1990. But none of this varied background quite prepared him for his 2003 encounter with 10 people at Dublin’s Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture.”

“Before the company embarks on a cross-country tour … the [RDB] is offering a repertory sampler in New York on Sunday and Monday.” Tickets are long since sold out, “but both evenings will be livestreamed at www.ustream.tv/channel/worksandprocess.”

The resignation of company manager Gennady Yanin, due to an erotic photo website apparently designed specifically to discredit him, is just one more element in a turbulent, long-running saga at the Bolshoi. That saga includes repeated resignations by artistic directors, accusations of incompetent management and political interference, and the embarrassing spectacle of the historic theater’s five-year, massively over-budget restoration.

“Dressed in black tights, Natalya, 26, dances in front of a jury. Her dancing is important, but just as vital are her vital statistics. A children’s choreographer from Minsk, she was trying last week to become a dancer in the Crazy Horse cabaret, a Parisian-based dance show that has combined striptease and burlesque for the last 60 years.”

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has had one of the longest and most fruitful associations with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company of any American museum, has struck an agreement with the Cunningham Foundation to acquire as many as 150 of the art objects that have been central to the company’s dances” – works by Rauschenberg, Stella, Johns and others.

“Among his chief innovations was the development of an aesthetic in which music and dance coexisted without co-dependency: motion and sound enacted concurrently, with no causal relationship. Still, during the decades in which he ran the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, he solicited works from a staggering array of composers” – and not only his life partner, John Cage.

“Everyone felt Mr. Ailey was choreographing for them, period. And when he had to explain for the 19,000th time what something was about, he was so eloquent.”