Category: dance

“The company is also bidding farewell to principal dancer Chan Hon Goh, who is retiring in June after 20 years with the troupe, though not before she performs in Romeo and Juliet and Giselle later this season.”

“A series of setbacks in the £400m refurbishment of the Bolshoi theatre has put back its reopening by at least another two years, it emerged yesterday. The legendary [theatre], home to the Bolshoi opera and ballet companies, closed in 2005 for a total overhaul after decades of neglect turned the building into a fire hazard with a decaying structure and basements crumbling into an underground stream. The Moscow venue was supposed to reopen in spring last year.”

“[The] furlough for administrative staff during the week of April 13 through 17 was announced the same time as the company’s 2009-10 season, which includes a full-length… Swan Lake, newly conceived by artistic director Adam Sklute… Ballet West has no plans to scale back its current season, or upcoming productions.”

The company’s executive director says that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has withdrawn punitive action” over a teenage dancer who fell into the orchestra pit during a 2007 Nutcracker and injured her spine. An OSHA spokesperson, however, says that the case is still open.

From its first performances in 1909, Serge Diaghilev’s path-breaking company “was giving audiences three Gesamtkunstwerks an evening, and with a quality of movement that no Wagnerian opera had ever known… Ballet became innovatively sexy, astoundingly picturesque, dramatically challenging.” But in a new century, are Diaghilev’s productions still compelling? Can they be?

President Sarkozy has named Verdy, the 75-year-old former star of ABT and NYCB and the first woman to serve as artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Légion d’Honneur, the nation’s highest award.

Just a few weeks after calling off its April production and reducing next season’s schedule by half, the company has decided it can’t afford to present the two planned performances of its Valentine’s Day program. At this point, Madison Ballet won’t take the stage again until The Nutcracker next Christmas.

An evidently inebriated 28-year-old allegedly attacked three members of the troupe and a security guard in the lobby of a Minneapolis hotel. The culprit was apparently angry that the visiting dancers were speaking a foreign language; during the assault and in the squad car afterwards, he also made “homophobic and racially based remarks.”

“An epidemic of flirtiness has attacked our ballet companies. The dancers woo us, grin at us, give us saucy looks. … The situation is worse, of course, in lighter-hearted pieces.”

“Beginning Sunday and for at least the next three months, a new organization called Class is bringing some relief, offering a grass-roots network of innovative and inexpensive classes designed by and for a new generation of dance teachers and students.”