Category: dance

“The Ballet cut three staff positions, immediately stopped advertising , and most dramatically, cancelled the remainder of its season in the huge and expensive Community Center Theatre. Then [co-artistic director Ron] Cunningham did something really radical, he added performances… dozens of smaller ones at the Mondavi Center, McClatchy high, in art galleries and mostly in the Ballet’s home studios. The revamped season was a gamble.”

“Birmingham Hippodrome, along with long-standing resident companies the Birmingham Royal Ballet and DanceXchange, is laying plans to become an international centre for dance.” The venue’s CEO said, “Over a third of the half a million tickets we sell are for dance performances, which means we sell more tickets for dance than any venue outside London.”

“Canadian ballet dancer Jason Reilly has elected to sit tight in Stuttgart, withdrawing a pledge to take up a post [as a principal dancer] at the National Ballet of Canada.”

“Ballet BC is returning to the stage in September under new interim artistic director Emily Molnar for a single evening’s performance featuring dancers from the National Ballet. … [The company] previously announced it the suspension of its 2009-2010 subscription series and confirmed it would not be participating in the biggest cultural festival in the country next year, the 2010 Cultural Olympiad.”

“Metropolitan Classical Ballet, the Arlington-based dance company that has been a fixture on the [Dallas-Fort Worth] Metroplex’s dance scene for more than a decade, announced Tuesday that it will severely curtail its upcoming season, including eliminating all three scheduled repertory shows at Bass Performance Hall.”

The popularity of television series like Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance and America’s Best Dance Crew is leading to a surge of enrollment in dance classes.

“Max Kepler-Rozycki, 16, has just received an $800,000 bonus to sign with the Minnesota Twins, a stunning sum for a teenager out of Europe and a record for an amateur position player outside the U.S. and Latin America. … But the reason the Twins are betting long on a kid who is still two years away from his high school graduation is another pair of attributes scouts talk about, both inherited from his parents, former Berlin ballet stars.”

Michael Kaiser: “Modern dance is one of the glories of American cultural history. … But virtually every great modern dance company was founded more than 40 years ago. Where is the current, not to mention next, generation of great modern dance companies to carry the torch?” And will they have the administrative and board support they need to survive and thrive?

“The last time the Cleveland Orchestra accompanied ballet from the pit at Blossom, in performance with Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Ballet, it was 1984. (The Joffrey last performed at Blossom in 1979.) Reopening the pit after 25 years and preparing the pavilion to host ballet again has been no easy matter.”

Alastair Macaulay: “Dancing together, Astaire and Rogers expressed many of love’s moods: courtship and seduction, repartee and responsiveness, teasing and challenge, the surprise of newfound harmony, the happy recapture of bygone romance, the giddy exhilaration of high spirits and intense mutual accord, the sense of a perfect balance of power, the tragedy of parting and, not least, the sense of love as role playing.”