Category: dance

The New York Times uses the dance company Momix to create its Sunday magazine cover

The six-year-old Dallas/Fort Worth company has faced lots of financial trouble lately, though its board chair now says, “We have turned this ship around.” But serious questions have arisen about some of TBT’s past business practices, such as paying almost $700,000 to two board members and making a loan to artistic director Ben Stevenson for a down payment on a house.

Liu Yan was one of China’s very best classical dancers, and she had been given the only solo dance spot at the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics. Just two weeks before the performance of a lifetime, she suffered a freak accident in rehearsal, with injuries that have left her paralyzed from the waist down.

The company’s new artistic director, James Canfield, “likes his dancers athletic, his programs edgy and his company energetic.” His first season in Las Vegas will be all new productions, no story ballets (except for a revamped Nutcracker), and “a series of impromptu performances at public venues” on a portable 4-by-8-foot stage.

“American Ballet Theater announced on Thursday that it had received a gift of $5 million from Toni and Martin Sosnoff … the single largest it has received from a private donor.” The money will be put into a fund dedicated to supporting all new ballets that ABT commissions.

Merce Cunningham company star Holley Farmer: “When newer dancers come into [a piece], it’s like clockwork: Everyone cries because you can’t see anything and the material is very technically challenging and you’re doing it in the dark sometimes or all of a sudden there’s a light in your face and you don’t know where it’s coming from … [You’re crying] because you realize that you’re probably going to be fighting for your life onstage instead of the other things that you try to do.”

New artistic director James Canfield “is doing away with the previous regime’s hierarchically tiered model, deleting titles of principal, soloist and corps de ballet. In other words, there are no more stars. Every dancer is on equal footing.”

Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh’s new work Just Add Water? “explores not only the global ethnic mix that makes up modern Britain, but the cuisine that results from it.”

American Ballet Theatre has promoted Veronika Part, who has been a soloist with the company since 2002, to principal dancer, effective May 18. The St. Petersburg native studied at the Vaganova Ballet Academy and became a soloist at the Kirov in 1998.

“Scott Black, who has served as executive director of the OK Mozart International Festival for three years, will become managing director of Tulsa Ballet” in July.