Category: dance

The West Australian Ballet’s new artistic director and general manager have not had an easy start to their tenure. Disputes with the company’s dancers, long simmering under the company’s old management, have escalated in recent weeks, and the new management team faces a possible dancers’ strike over a pay scale that they agree is entirely inadequate.

A disappointing performance of George Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations has Robert Gottlieb worrying about the condition of New York City Ballet. Part of the problem can be chalked up to simple exhaustion – after all, Nutcracker season only just ended. But still, it’s worth asking: “Are we witnessing the continuing erosion of the company’s classical style?”

“Are ballet audiences simply indifferent to music? The evidence isn’t encouraging. Ballet orchestras tend to be much worse than symphony orchestras or those that accompany opera. For years, the New York City Ballet Orchestra has been beyond embarrassing, producing not music but a barren hodgepodge of feints in the general direction of what the composer called for, all held together with a leaden hand by the conductor.”

Boston Ballet’s resident choreographer, Jorma Elo, is notorious for not getting his dances done on time, but his stark, high-energy style has reenergized an often-troubled company. “In recent years, as Elo’s schedule has filled up with prestigious commissions, he’s become known for a particular contemporary spin on ballet… He won’t say what his pieces are meant to convey, or how his own calm demeanor offstage relates to the often frantic energy onstage.”

Bill T. Jones has a hot project on Broadway this season, but he’s already looking beyond it. “Storytelling is supreme. I’ve been reminded of that, working in theater. There’s an audience now that’s younger. It has fewer biases. Maybe they can go in different directions — if we have the work there for them to see.”

“Once the world’s pre-eminent classical dance company, the Bolshoi was in steep artistic decline when, in January 2004, Alexei Ratmansky was chosen, at age 35, to bring the troupe back from the brink of irrelevance and remake it into a cultural force befitting its heritage. It’s a strategy that’s risky yet necessary if the company is to reclaim its place not just as a custodian of the classics but also as an innovative producer of superlative new ballet.”

”The model of the kind of world we now inhabit was there in Cunningham’s world long before the Internet or computer existed. The space is decentralized, exits and entrances are very unpredictable. It’s not unlike the way you establish multiple windows on the computer. If I were looking for an early model in a time-based art like dance that anticipates what our life is like in cyberspace I’d say it’s there in Cunningham’s work.”

“She reviewed dance in the 1940s for The Chicago Times and other newspapers, and later for Dance Magazine for many years. She also contributed to many dance journals and encyclopedias. But her films of touring ballet performances — shot from the wings in the ’40s and ’50s, often with a windup camera — proved to be her most important contribution to the field.”

She created Canadian dance, by creating the National Ballet of Canada. “She was complicated, and she had this vision of excellence that she willed us to become and we did. We rose to this demanding, visionary force. Her gift to us was her life and it shaped and transformed generations of us, and it goes beyond dance.”

She was founder of Canada’s National Ballet. “Franca came to Canada in 1951 and had a classical ballet company running within 10 months, though she had to support herself by working as a file clerk at Eaton’s. She recruited and trained dancers for the first performance of the National Ballet of Canada on Nov. 12, 1951, at Toronto’s Eaton Auditorium.”