Category: dance

“The choreographer Siobhan Davies has just announced that she is creating Britain’s first digital archive for dance, which will contain films, images, notes and texts relating to her work, dating back to 1977. It will be very useful, of course. But the most vital mode of transmission is human memory….”

“The National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will share a stage in Vancouver next February as part of the cultural Olympiad accompanying the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The Olympic ballet gala, featuring contemporary dance from the two classical ballet companies, is one of 35 new arts projects announced Monday by Vancouver 2010 organizers.”

“Choreography is the most fragile of art forms. The Balanchine repertory was lucky in that, within a few years of his death the Balanchine Trust was established to supervise stagings. But the Ashton repertory is in more perilous condition.”

“Back in the early 1970s, Yvonne Rainer was in the midst of a transition from postmodern dance maker to experimental film auteur. She still had all kinds of ideas for new dances, but she would jokingly send them to her friend, the choreographer Trisha Brown, instead of realizing them herself. It has only been in the last decade, after a request from a stellar admirer, that Rainer returned to dance, and now, at age 74, she finds herself firmly in the throes of her first artistic love.”

“After a furious three-week fundraising effort that included a spectacular gala performance last week, the ballet announced that it has surpassed its $750,000 needed to guarantee that it could continue beyond June 30. By the end of the day Wednesday, the company had raised $853,271.”

“With less than two weeks remaining before the end of its current fiscal year, the Texas Ballet Theater has reached its fundraising goal of $2 million dollars – the total that it said was needed over the last six months in order to give the financially strapped company renewed stability as it plans for the upcoming 2009-2010 [season].”

“In a few months Bovim Ballet, which ends its current five-city national tour at Gold Reef City this week, has certainly proved a point. After premiering at Artscape in January and having had a sold-out season at Oude Libertas in Stellenbosch, South Africa’s newest classically-based dance company has not only been surviving on box office, but making a neat profit.”

“On Friday night [at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées], in a culmination of years of diplomatic and artistic negotiation, the curtain will be lifted on four of the works that helped make the dance troupe’s name.” The program includes “two of the company’s best-known ballets, Scheherazade and Ravel’s Bolero, alongside two 1912 works which were largely forgotten about after Diaghilev’s death in 1929.”

“A special all-dance benefit has raised approximately $710,000 for the financially troubled Oregon Ballet Theater. … The ballet has until the end of its fiscal year, June 30, to raise the $750,000 it needs to close a funding gap caused by a dramatic reduction in donations and a series of Christmas-time storms that decimated crowds for its most important production, ‘The Nutcracker.'”