Category: dance

“The School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop Performances are like the rookie draft of the dance world, in which students barely out of high school perform classic repertoire and a lucky, limber few get chosen to shine in lead roles (an even luckier handful are then chosen to join the corps of New York City Ballet)… This year, the crop of newbies was especially compelling.”

Alastair Macaulay is impressed with the school of dance at Lincoln Center. “I suspect we will not look back on 2007 as a vintage year for the School of American Ballet. But where the average level is as high as shown in this ‘Gounod’ corps, there is no doubting that Kirstein’s school is in powerful shape.”

“What makes it so particularly bittersweet is that – as anyone who saw her recent, luminous appearance in Balanchine’s Apollo at the Opera House will testify – Bussell is dancing as well now as she has ever danced in her life, her line, musicality, athleticism and glamour still astonishing. And a great many people are terribly sad to see her go.”

When your dance troupe markets itself as a purveyor of extreme action and occasionally dangerous stunts, injuries probably have to be considered an occupational hazard. But that doesn’t make it any easier for your dancers to recover their confidence when a colleague suffers a serious injury.

The two-hour “Dance” averaged 9.2 million viewers and a 4.0 rating/12 share in the adults 18-49 demographic, according to preliminary estimates released Thursday by Nielsen Media Research.”

“Dance San Diego, a bimonthly that debuted this month, is also a niche publication. But the San Diego dance community seems a tenuous base for an advertising-supported magazine. Looking at the nine dance companies recently funded by the Arts and Culture Commission – the largest, best-established troupes in town – their combined 2006 income was less than $4 million.”

“They’ve proved that they can give Los Angeles a classical company worth supporting in its growth from an underfunded 31-dancer ensemble offering sporadic performances to the kind of large-scale, year-round institutions that are the source of local pride in cities such as Houston, Boston, Seattle, Miami and San Francisco. They’ve done their job and so have the dancers. The rest is up to Los Angeles itself.”

American Ballet Theatre holds a reunion of dancers. “To see them was to see the company’s long history, from 91-year-old Annabelle Lyon, who danced with Ballet Theater from 1940 to 1943 and was the company’s first Giselle, to Jamar M. Goodman (1998 to 2003), who, after Ballet Theater’s performance of “The Dream,” was besieged backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House by women in full fairy regalia eager for hugs and the latest news.”

“I never saw the company perform. By all accounts, they were a talented group, based in the classical technique but coming out of a theatrical base – the Bristol Old Vic. Living a hand-to-mouth existence, WTB took to the road with very little money and no home base, performing in scout and church halls and, on one memorable occasion, a west country barn where the pigsties stood in for changing rooms.”

“Dancers call it muscle memory. And while it obviously manifests itself physically as far as dance is concerned, what actually happens, according to neuroscientists, is that the movements become thoroughly mapped in the brain, creating a shorthand between thinking and doing.”