Category: dance

The career trajectory of a dancer is so short that, from a very early age, talented specimens are encouraged to devote themselves heart and soul to their art, and not to waste a minute on frivolities like, say, higher education. The result is that many dancers, who can expect to retire their toe shoes before they turn 40, are simply not qualified to do anything else once they do retire. Two prominent New York ballet companies have been looking to change that unfortunate equation, offering its young dancers the chance to take classes at conveniently located colleges, even as they continue their rigorous dance studies.

Big plans are in the works for the Victoria Dance Series Society since receiving a major financial boost last week.

The New Orleans Ballet Association has got up and running again. “NOBA lost most of its season and its chief venue, the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, to Hurricane Katrina. It also was forced to suspend its educational outreach efforts temporarily with thousands of area youth. Help has poured in from patrons, volunteers and artists, including the New York-based Parsons company, which waived fees for its Wednesday and Thursday performances.”

“Ballet is a bastard art, a highwire pas de quatre of music, choreography, theatre and design. Though the composer speaks first, for most watchers it is when the curtain rises that they snap that critical first impression. Before the dancers have moved, the audience’s senses and intuitions have been switched to a certain frequency by the designer.”

“There is clearly a growing market for dance films and videos, the latest technological delivery system being the DVD. Walk into any store with a healthy selection of performing-arts DVD’s, and those on dance seem to burst from the shelves (or the virtual shelves, if you’re looking online).”

Last summer, in a now-famous letter to The New Yorker, choreographer Tere O’Connor complained that “critics do not know how to read dances…they don’t do the work of finding out what is actually going on in the minds of the artists or what are the contexts in which these works are created. They have reduced dance criticism to an explanatory, superficial, retelling of events.” So what should that complicated between dance critic and artist be?

A chance meeting between an up-and-coming young Canadian choreographer and some Broadway bigwigs appears to have sparked quite an impressive collaboration, and possibly launched a new star into the forefront of the dance galaxy. In the space of only a few months, Aszure Barton has gone from a residency at the Baryshnikov Center in lower Manhattan to directing the choreography for a new Broadway production of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, and creating a new solo dance for Mikhail Baryshnikov himself.

Cleveland’s Playhouse Square has announced that it will no longer present the series of touring ballet companies it began showcasing in 2002, citing a “lack of audience growth, declining philanthropic support and the high cost of presenting world-class ballet… The series was started in 2002 to fill a void following the demise of Cleveland San Jose Ballet. It featured American Ballet Theatre, the Kirov Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Joffrey Ballet and other leading international companies.”

“Former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Evelyn Cisneros-Legate has been named academy director of Irvine-based Ballet Pacifica. She will take over as head of the company’s school from husband and wife John Gardner and Amanda McKerrow when their contracts expire at the end of July… Also, Ballet Pacifica interim managing director Melody Wolfgram has been named executive director, effective immediately.”

Twyla Tharp is unquestionably one of the most influential figures in the dance world of today, but it sometimes seems as if the general public is completely unaware of her existence. A new biography aims to change that, and dovetails nicely with Tharp’s own efforts to market herself and her dances in recent years.