Category: dance

“Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg’s talent — always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions –prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dance theater.”

Like Leonard Bernstein, “Robbins believed that it was possible to create a distinctively American style of high art that could draw on popular culture without compromising its own underlying seriousness.”

“The company didn’t envision its ambitious New Works Festival, the centerpiece of the San Francisco Ballet’s 75th-anniversary season, as a microcosm of what’s wrong with the ballet world. But the fact that this large outlay of money, time and talent — unprecedented in its scope — produced more mediocrity than revelation points to a big problem for ballet. Self-renewal is not its strong suit.”

Antony Tudor “was known as the psychological choreographer, and he arrived when psychology entered American popular culture.” It was a theme to which Tudor would return over and over in his long career.

Toe shoes are a major budget expense for ballet companies. The San Francisco Ballet provides 120 pairs of pointe shoes for each of its 40 female dancers. The American Ballet Theatre in New York City sets aside $350,000 for pointe shoes per season, about $7,500 per ballerina.

“We should have been a wonderful, democratic country. Instead we had 21 years of military dictatorship, something we are still paying for. So bossa nova represents a different way of life; a culture more sophisticated than the one we have today.”

Australian Ballet’s lavish pre-Christmas production of Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker is responsible for the company’s $1.8 million operating deficit, its 2007 annual report reveals.

“If ballet dancers say they are desperate to perform new choreography, and ballet directors say they would love to give it to them, can it really just be the public’s lack of imagination that keeps our companies confined to such cautious repertoires? Or is it that we need to look to America for better ways of marketing the art form?”

Richard Chen See is the new director of the New York International Ballet Competition. Chen See is a 14-year veteran of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Robbins spent 30 years of his life working with Balanchine’s NY City Ballet. “This kept him in Balanchine’s shadow, but on the whole he loved and revered that shadow. It is hard to think of any world-famous artist in history working as Robbins chose to: as great a celebrity as Balanchine or more so, and much wealthier, he used the dancers Balanchine had trained, he used ballet technique as Balanchine had developed it, and his ballets were performed in a repertory that was dominated by Balanchine’s.”