Category: dance

“An anonymous donor has purchased $100,000 in tickets to Colorado Ballet’s production of Beauty and the Beast for use by disadvantaged Denver families.”

“Miami City Ballet has announced an ambitious slate of new programming and an expanded budget for its 25th season launching this fall.” The company will add four new works to its repertoire and return to performing with live musicians in 2010-11, thanks to an increased budget of $15 million.

The program “gave seven monster technicians permission – and an outlet – to leave the ladies in tutus behind and let loose their spectacular ballet chops. … The rapid-fire barrage of soaring leaps and whirring vertical air turns, some with scissoring directional changes while hanging in space, reduced the Ahmanson Theatre audience to blithering disbelief.”

Mark Morris: “If one is gay, as am I, one is supposedly predisposed to adore figure skating. I missed that day at Gay High.”

In September 2008, Sarah Lamb of the Royal Ballet was rehearsing a pas de deux in Manon when she accidentally smacked her left foot into her partner, severely breaking four metatarsals and rupturing the arch. She recounts spending more than a year trying to fathom a life beyond ballet, then finding herself able to get back on pointe and on stage.

Michael Nunn and William Trevitt “have reached their early 40s, the crisis years for dancers. … So they’re experimenting with a new identity, as the Ballet Dadz you might say, by shifting out of dancing and into directing. The dancers in Nunn’s ballet class – aged 19 to 24 and all male – are members of an ensemble that he and Trevitt are launching as ‘the second generation’ Ballet Boyz.”

“An audience of 5,000 watched Russian dancers Elena Andrienko, Ruslan Skvorsto, Ana Antonicheva and Dimitri Belogolovstsev take to the stage. It was the first time the Bolshoi have performed in Cuba since 1980 amid improving relationships between the two countries.”

There is a “strange wave of contemporary dance that has been blowing across Africa, in what dancers like Opiyo Okach’s Senegalese Germaine Acogny, Ivorian Alphonse Tierou and Beninois Koffi Koko describe as “shifting the centre of African dance”. Opiyo is an award winning dancer at large, with Kenyan roots.

The Kresge Foundation has given the company $900,000 toward the completion of its new headquarters. “In order to receive the $900,000, the ballet must raise $3 million over the next 18 months, which will go toward the total remaining campaign goal of $5.8 million.”

The $8 million [Aus] donation from the Ian Potter Foundation will go largely to maintenance and improvements to the company’s Melbourne headquarters, which will be renamed in honor of Lady Primrose Potter.