Category: dance

“To hear the choreographer Deborah Hay talk, there is no overstating the connection between visual art and dance in New York in the 1960s, when the Judson Dance Theater movement was radically questioning the nature of performance… Today’s New York scene, in which the various art worlds and their audiences have largely retreated to their own corners, makes Ms. Hay’s experience — which was just as powerful for many visual artists — sound like an impossible utopia.” But some are working to reacquaint the genres…

“Appearing to regain its financial footing, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre said Wednesday it ended the year with its first surplus in six years and with a 26 percent jump in ticket sales, reversing an 11-year slide.” PBT dancers agreed to a wage freeze earlier this year, and company officials credited them with helping to bring the fiscal picture into balance.

Christopher Wheeldon, who has ridden a wave of almost universally positive press to his position at the top of the dance world, has lately been feeling the pain of the press’s rougher side. Judith Mackrell says it was bound to happen eventually. “It has been years since anyone planned a new ballet company of the scale and ambition Wheeldon was talking about, [and] even before Morphoses had set foot on stage, the volume of media coverage began to turn counter-productive.”

The Mark Morris Dance Center offers weekly classes for people with Parkinson’s, a chronic and progressive brain disorder. “When members of the class see us in performance, they see that they’ve learned some of the same movements. That gives them a sense of empowerment and a sense of community.”

The “state-of-the-art off-Broadway theater – 37 Arts, which is also home to Baryshnikov’s dance studio and foundation – is being foreclosed on by the company that built it, The Post has learned. The Builders Group is expected to foreclose within days on liens against the theater totaling nearly $14 million, sources say.”

“Love, death, loss, devastation: these are the terms dancers tend to apply to ‘transition,’ dancer-speak for retirement since Career Transition for Dancers, a nonprofit service organization, was established in 1985. In that time more than 3,500 dancers (average age: 29), have gone to the organization’s cramped Midtown offices to ‘turn their minds toward being older,’ in the words of one mentor.”

“Karen Kain has just one season under her belt – not enough time to develop a programming pattern. That said, ballet purists might see some of the upcoming 2007-08 works as either not traditional enough, or, horror of horrors, down-market.”

“Nureyev embodied the heroic perfectionism of mid-century Soviet training, which was more insistently magnificent than anything in the West. Younger male dancers quickly copied him, strode the stage like tigers, after he’d shown the way. What we did not know, until the airing in August on PBS of a new BBC documentary and the publication this month of a massive new biography, was how hard-won that technique was, how iconoclastic he’d already been in Russia.”

The Joffrey Ballet’s new director took his first bows this week, and while Ashley Wheater may have a long and successful tenure ahead, Sid Smith was disturbed that he chose to introduce himself to Chicago’s innovative and risk-taking company by staging one of the oldest and safest ballets available. “Resident ballet troupes can always use a Giselle, and now the Joffrey has a perfectly respectable version. But one hopes Wheater, when forging ahead, will lean more toward the electricity generated by the likes of last season’s Cinderella, rekindling the flair and imagination that make Joffrey selections unpredictable and special.”

Christopher Wheeldon may or may not be the greatest choreographer of his generation. But there can be no doubt that he is the current king of buzz in the dance world. “If you want to know why Mr. Wheeldon, only 34, has become such a big deal in ballet, just check out which dancers are appearing with Morphoses,” his new company.