Category: dance

The Music Center’s dance season has called off one of its six remaining programs this season: three June performances by Nederlands Dans Theater I. The decision was made “solely on the basis of our desire to manage our resources in the most prudent fashion.” The series has recently seen “reduced donor giving, a decline in investment revenue and a shortfall in ticket sales.”

London-based choreographer Rafael Bonachela has just begun his tenure leading the popular and dynamic troupe. The SDC had been somewhat rudderless since longtime directors Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon quit in 2006 over persistent money trouble; their planned successor, Tanja Liedtke, was killed in an accident shortly before she assumed the post.

“But choreographer Tere O’Connor, 50, who also calls himself ‘an advanced architectural hobbyist,’ sees plenty of connections between the two [disciplines].” His piece Rammed Earth, named after an ancient building technique, makes “conceptual links between solid and moving architecture.”

The art of the dance sits near the top of the list of professions favored under a new points system for admitting non-EU immigrants announced by the UK’s Home Office. Other sought-after workers include sheep shearers, chemical engineers, horse trainers, math and science teachers, physicists and frozen fish filleters (Scotland only).

Jack Lemmon, a widely-experienced dance administrator who has managed the Louisville Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Ballet Idaho and the Joffrey Ballet, takes the reins of the recently stabilized Denver company as of Jan. 1.

The climactic scene of the Broadway production of Equus is best known at the moment for the fact that actor Daniel Radclyffe is naked when it begins, but the most interesting figures in the scene are six “horses,” who enact a mesmerizing, terrifying ballet as they are viciously blinded by Radclyffe. The scene is one of the most painstakingly choreographed moments on Broadway.

Minneapolis’s Southern Theater, one of the Twin Cities’ premiere dance venues, has been embroiled in infighting and recrimination since the board decided to fire its founding artistic director last summer. “For now, it appears the artists and the board have put most of their differences aside to keep the 2008-09 season alive. But getting to this point was a difficult and occasionally ugly process.”

“The Texas Ballet Theater announced Friday that it had received a $500,000 grant from the Dallas-based Meadows Foundation, enabling the financially beleaguered ballet to reach its goal of $2 million to keep its doors open the rest of the year.”

The choreographer’s 2006 dance-theater piece underground, inspired by the Weather Underground’s anti-war and anti-racism protests, suddenly became topical as onetime Underground leader William Ayers became an issue in the presidential campaign.