Category: dance

The new Toronto International Dance Festival has been showcasing hits from the past. But “despite the ‘international’ in its title, the out-of-country entries in the festival have been its least attractive feature so far. Two companies from California performing in the mixed programs reminded one of the old student-danced fFIDA shows.”

Las Vegas shows have gone completely over the top in recent years, with dazzling special effects, copious nudity, and massive set pieces all serving as expensive marketing gimmicks designed to lure the maximum number of tourists in the door. So where does all this leave the traditional Vegas showgirl? Nowhere good, unfortunately.

No one is saying anything officially, but all indications are that Ohio Ballet has folded up its tent and disappeared into the Akron night. The group’s artistic director has accepted a job with Arizona’s Ballet Tucson, and “just after the ballet board put together a recovery plan, its president, George Petrenko, died in January and the group began to fall apart.”

The Mark Morris Dance Group turns 25 this year, and the company is humming along on all cylinders, its schedule crammed full and its continued artistic relevance continually extolled. “There is also a settled-in sense of comfort — dare one say domesticity? — for this once shaggy-maned provocateur who seemed to cultivate a personal image of outrageousness, even as his early dances resonated with an earthy honesty that suggested a kinship with an earlier, more forthright era of modern dance.”

John Rockwell responds to Lewis Segals’s rant against ballet in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “Although I disagree with him on almost every count, there is something salutary about his position. There are so many ballet magazines and ballet Web sites out there now that simply assume the superiority of ballet to all other forms of dance that it is nice to have a corrective.”

“Can a dance fringe festival morph itself into a curated big-ticket item and succeed? The newly transformed Toronto International Dance Festival (TIDF) opens Tuesday with Montreal’s legendary Margie Gillis and only at the end of its 12-day run will artistic director Michael Menegon know whether his gamble has paid off.”

“Hip-hop has become a worldwide phenomenon, a world of bling and bravado in which women sometimes appear as little more than a jiggling, sexually rapacious wall of thongs. This image is especially distasteful to the growing number of b-girls, for whom breaking is not just a dance form but a way of life.”

“When other forms of concert dance — not to mention movies, TV or the theater — are this empty and useless, it’s easy to openly dislike or even despise them. But ballet has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall. If people hate ballet, they frequently feel guilty and assume that it’s got to be their own fault, that they’re not educated or sensitive enough… Forget it. Most ballet is every bit as bad as audiences secretly suspect — and it’s not going to improve until companies stop conning or shaming us into accepting damaged goods. In the meantime, guilt-free hatred of ballet is reasonable, maybe even necessary.”

San Francisco Ballet has built relationships with some of America’s leading choreographers, and this in turn has given the company a distinctive look. “With his long-standing commitment to Forsythe, Morris and Wheeldon, he has steeped his dancers in the working process of masters. They have responded with what amounts to a house aesthetic.”

Carlos Acosta is the hottest thing going in the London dance world, and the Royal Ballet’s biggest current star. But as well as things are going for Acosta and the Royals at the moment, the dancer fears that his industry is gambling with its future. “The dangerous dearth of young choreographers and new full-length ballets, he said, means that the future classics of the repertoire are not being created.”