Category: dance

“Due to a neighborhood dispute over parking and crowd control at its former digs in a long-unused portion of a Christian Science Church in Venice, the Blankenship Ballet Company of Venice has left the Westside and taken up residence downtown at Vibiana.” The new space boasts loads more nearby parking lots — and room for hundreds of additional audience members.

Alastair Macaulay: “The full-evening Clytemnestra was first presented 50 years ago. It’s been claimed as the ultimate Graham dance drama, as an overambitious and pretentious mess, as the climax of the choregrapher’s 1940s-50s era of dramatizing Greek myths in psychological terms, as a turgid collection of stylistic clichés … I find all these responses valid; and I’m glad I was there.”

“One of [Rivka Nahari’s] goals this past November, when she opened her studio in the basement of her Flatbush home, was to increase the level of dance training available to frum women. Nahari hopes to find a few gifted and dedicated female dancers and create a professional company so that the girls won’t have to go outside the community for an artistic education.”

“The Royal Ballet is to make its first visit to Cuba as part of its 2009 summer tour, which will see the company travel through Washington, Granada and Havana. … Cuban RB principal guest artist Carlos Acosta will lead the company for the first performance of [Kenneth MacMillan’s] Manon with Tamara Rojo” at the Gran Teatro de la Habana.

“Ballet West will cut four positions, freeze salaries, request furloughs and reduce pension contributions for its 35-member administrative staff, as part of a plan to reduce $1.2 million from the dance company’s operating budget for the 2009-2010 season.”

The company “plans to increase the number of main-stage programs from five to six and to extend the runs of several productions, including the company’s popular version of The Nutcracker. … In addition, the entire season will be produced with live music by Symphony Silicon Valley. In the past, some productions have been done to recorded music to contain costs.”

“Her longstanding partner fell to his knees in devoted homage before Tina LeBlanc during the extended, celebratory curtain calls, and one could sense the entire audience collectively joining in that spirit, as San Francisco Ballet said farewell to this most distinctive, exuberantly American ballerina Saturday night.”

“The contemporary dance world has been accused of ‘fawning over’ athletic, powerful images of masculinity as projected by artists such as Wayne McGregor and Hofesh Shechter, at the expense of promoting female choreographers.” Whose fault is this? Let the finger-pointing begin.

Sarah Kaufman: “We are cursed with George Balanchine, cursed with an overload of his ballets as well as with the ubiquity of the sinewy style he favored, his preference for plotless works on a naked stage, his taste for fast, skinny, emotionally guarded dancers.”

“Shrinking investments left the company with a net loss of $1,940,404 for last year, but a strong box office, successful international tour and strategic cost-cutting have enabled the company to post an operating surplus of $861,020. The report, published yesterday, shows the company cut operating costs by more than $1 million last year.”