Category: dance

“The pressing question is: How are these works being danced now? There has been plenty of complaint in the past two decades about the NYCB’s custodianship of the Balanchine canon. The company’s performances have frequently been criticized as slipshod. The rich, subtle dynamics that characterized NYCB performances when Balanchine himself supervised them were too often absent from the evening’s program, as they have been for some time. But a handful of extraordinary talents often made the stage vibrant.”

Lincoln Kirstein was a formidable figure in the development of American dance, and this week, a “wide-ranging centennial celebration” for the much admired but little understood educator gets underway in New York. “He was formidable yet oddly shy, a manipulator whose scheming was almost always discernible and almost always in the service of his beloved dance. He is probably best known for having founded, with George Balanchine, the City Ballet and its school. But he was a Renaissance man of the arts, though that title sat uneasily on his massive, ungainly shoulders.”

A retired Marine commanding officer in a small town in Maine wanted to make his young daughter’s dreams come true, so he lured retired Russian ballet star Andrei Bossov to rural Maine…

“When you consider that Merce Cunningham, Robert Joffrey and Mark Morris were also born here, and first studied dance here, you can’t help wondering if some dance-friendly ingredient flows in the air. You wonder the same again when you recall that Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet has been among America’s foremost ballet companies since the 1980s, reaching international stature in the 1990s. Until this month these and other Northwestern dance strands felt unconnected, and a local complaint about Pacific Northwest Ballet has been that it isn’t Northwestern enough.”

“Ballet, like opera and classical music, has a serious image problem in America, and companies are increasingly trying to combat it and attract new, younger viewers. This struggle has even reached the gates of the vaunted City Ballet.”

The folding of the Orange County, California-based Ballet Pacifica was a long time coming, as a series of mistakes and bad decisions made the collapse almost inevitable. “As the board of directors struggled to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities, it canceled repertory performances, cut short the professional dancers’ contracts, and even gave away its new choreography workshop.” It was a classic example of an arts group being run like a for-profit business, and it failed to take into account public attitudes.

“As a young man, Kirstein wanted to be a painter, and in the beginning of his involvement with the ballet he seems to have envisioned himself as the successor to Diaghilev, involved in every aspect of production. Indeed, he occupied such an aesthetic role in Ballet Caravan, the company he ran from 1936 to 1940. With City Ballet, his role evolved quite differently, yet the model is a familiar one.”

“In the 18th and 19th centuries, composers included music for dance interludes in their scores, but the dances were not intended to do much more than add to the spectacle and possibly give the singers a chance to catch their breaths. Today that tradition of separate and unequal is changing, largely because of innovative directors like Peter Sellars, and choreographer-directors like Mark Morris and Trisha Brown.”

“Just as the once-mighty DVD seems headed for the same technological graveyard as eight-track audiotapes, vinyl record albums and VHS video, more and more dance performances — newly shot as well as rereleased — are showing up in that format.”

“Since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, female dancers and fashion models have presented near-identical symptoms of damage, with failure to live up to extreme physical ideals resulting in drug and medication abuse, mental health problems and even death from starvation.” But “the gothically skinny ‘bunhead’ with her sunken cheeks and freaky eating habits – once such a staple character of ballet schools and companies – is now very much out of favour.”