Category: dance

What has happened to the dance audience in Toronto? Mark Hammond, director of programming at the Hummingbird Centre, puts it bluntly: “There isn’t one.” Harbourfront dance programmer Jeanne Holmes is more optimistic. “There’s an ebb and flow in dance,” she says. “I think we’re at the bottom of an ebb.”

“Some may grouse that his Nureyev film is not really a dance film. The dance sequences are just snippets, but the oral history fills in many blanks. Many of the talking heads — early teachers, childhood acquaintances, dancers, fans, admirers, an old flame Nureyev seriously considered marrying — are quoted in the Kavanagh biography, but none register in print as memorably or as vividly as here.”

“Exercise has long been considered beneficial for those with Parkinson’s, which is medically defined as a movement disorder caused at least in part by a loss of brain cells that release the nerve-to-nerve signaling chemical dopamine.” So dance classes have a therapeutic effect.

A new documentary looks at one of the most interesting dancers of the 20th Century. “Nureyev’s genius was to make things that belonged to the public domain entirely his own, immediate and pressing.”

“If the Vail festival is the big story of the moment, several other organizations in Colorado are contributing to the state’s latest dance renaissance, including the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, which made its third appearance in January at the Joyce Theater in New York City. The Colorado Ballet, which appears to be recovering from its once-precarious financial predicament, is preparing for its second season under the artistic direction of Gil Boggs, a former principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre in New York City.”

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre is optimistically looking forward to this season. “PBT had been secretly spiraling out of control for some time, mired in financial problems, orchestral unrest and the specter of dwindling audiences. Last season, the company eliminated most of those in an almost miraculous recovery.”

“In 2007 being the only boy — at an audition, in a class, in a recital — is still a routine experience for ballet students in the United States. But for the promising group accepted each year into the School of American Ballet’s tuition-free boys’ program, which resumes Sept. 5, something different awaits: a class of their own.”

“The Bolshoi Ballet’s current season here, the third in four years, is such a success that it has inspired standing, shouting ovations from audiences and superlatives from sometimes finicky critics, including one who deemed a performance worthy of six stars out of five. The overboard reception has noted not just the astonishing individual dancing … but also the overall look, speed and spirit of this revitalized company under Alexei Ratmansky, now in his third year as artistic director.”

Christopher Wheeldon’s new Morphoses company debuts. “Though Mr. Wheeldon is a genuinely gifted dance maker, it’s yet unclear just how substantial or imaginative Wheeldon dance theater will prove as a genre. Certainly Morphoses is welcome. It is also important. But it will be valuable most if it helps Mr. Wheeldon himself to build on what he has achieved.”

“One reason, I think, is that he gives people the modern pleasure of seeing abstract work without leaving them scratching their heads over what it was about. Though he may not have a story on the surface, he always has one underneath, in the form of movement motifs. For every dance, he devises a certain number of key gestures, which he then weaves through the choreography.”