Category: dance

“The National Ballet of Canada has cancelled its five-city, 13-performance tour of Western Canada to avoid ‘undue financial risk,’ the company announced Monday afternoon. … For the first time in several years, the National Ballet is faced with running a deficit.”

“Virginia Johnson. A founding company member and the former editor of Pointe, a ballet magazine, she will succeed Mr. Mitchell this year. Dance Theater is no longer what it once was. In 2004 substantial debts forced it to disband its professional company. While there is still a school, as well as the Dance Theater of Harlem Ensemble, the lack of a main company has been disheartening for its former dancers and fans.”

“He was for many years a phenomenal dancer and has committed his whole career to virtuoso technical accomplishment. I sometimes think he was America’s Nijinsky, without the madness. Like Nijinsky he had an astounding jump, an extraordinary neck, an animal intensity, an actor’s changefulness. Like Nijinsky he does not mind offending his audience.”

“Almost four years after the collapse of Ballet Internationale, a new organization is seeking to reintroduce professional ballet in Indianapolis. Indianapolis City Ballet is backed by major local arts supporters … [and] Australian-born dancer and director John Meehan is serving as the ballet’s artistic chairman.”

“America’s oldest dance company, turning 77 next year, announced today that it will honor Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson in [2010,] his 25th season at the helm. He is running a company on a $41 million annual budget, with 73 dancers and a busy dance school of 20 staff and hundreds of students.”

“Dance UK director Caroline Miller has criticised the BBC for its lack of dance programming and expertise, claiming that a shortage of shows featuring the work of British companies is having a negative impact on the industry. The head of the lobbying body has called on the Corporation to reinstate a dance expert to its arts commissioning team.”

“Rambert Dance Company can proceed with plans for a new £14 million home near London’s South Bank ‘subject to contractual issues being resolved’, despite a legal wrangle preventing the larger building scheme it is part of from going ahead.”

San Francisco Ballet star Lorena Feijoo was trained at the National Ballet of Cuba under the legendary Alonso, from whom she separated on less-than-amicable terms. “Now here was Feijoo, 38, and at the invitation of the young Cuban Classical Ballet of Miami, about to appropriate her former mentor’s Carmen in front of what essentially was a Havana audience, made up mostly of the more-recently arrived.”

Angela Sterling: “I actually feel it. I know exactly in my eye and my body, I can tell when the dancer’s going to go up for a jump, so it’s like my body feels that moment in the air. That’s when I click, and usually I hear the clicks of the other photographers a split second later.”

Virginia Hepner, who has led several boards of directors in metro Atlanta, steps into the job on May 1. She replaces Barry Hughson, who is taking over the much-larger Boston Ballet.