Category: dance

A Colorado groups is bringing hiphop into the concert hall. “We’re presenting hip-hop dance in a prestigious format, like people have done with jazz or ballet for centuries on big stages. Hip-hop is not just some gangster-type facade. Even when the dance side of it becomes aggressive, or battling, it always ends up positively.”

John Rockwell seconds the notion that the current Martha Graham retrospective shows a company in disarray. This season’s offerings have been severely scaled back, the troupe’s leadership is chaotic at best, “the dancers have been erratically paid, touring engagements look sparse,” and perhaps worst of all, the company is facing yet another legal battle over its treatment of the Graham legacy.

A celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Martha Graham Company shows the company is in trouble, writes Tobi Tobias. “The Graham company is in serious distress. Granted, it is no stranger to turmoil. The difficulties have always gone beyond the money troubles common to dance troupes, though the group’s present financial straits are indeed dire.”

San Francsico Ballet is losing some of its biggest stars. This week, principal Yuri Possokhov, a “towering figure on the Opera House stage since 1994”, said he will retire from the company in July. “They are dropping like worn-out toe shoes over on Franklin Street. Two of the most memorable members of the corps are also leaving this year — Amanda Schull and Megan Low.”

“Ballet’s origins are more diverse than its image suggests, however, and a look at the art form’s history shows its reputation for elitism to be surprisingly undeserved.”

The artistic director of Ohio ballet complains that press coverage of his company helped lead to the company’s current difficulties and cancellation of a spring season. “In his view, the preview stories have discouraged people from buying tickets, and the reviews have been negative and nasty. His complaints are not limited to coverage of the ballet during his seven-year tenure. He also cited criticism of his predecessor, founding artistic director Heinz Poll, and he suggested that ‘nagging reviews’ of Cleveland San Jose Ballet contributed to that company’s demise.”

For two years, artist and choreographer Jonathan Stone has been filming people dancing with just their faces. “They’re like little character portraits,” he says. “Everyone chooses their own music, so I have absolutely no control over that. As I film lots of people, it builds up a portrait of a population and the varieties of musical taste. It can be anything from classical music to bits of jazz and thrash metal.”

There was a time when dance got star treatment on film. “But somewhere along the line, dance itself got lost in all the narrative strategies. Nowadays, film directors have come to believe that audiences can’t get any pleasure from just watching it — and they don’t stop with merely cutting it to pieces in the editing room. No, they make sure their films are structured so dancing becomes some kind of competitive ordeal. Yes, Astaire and Rogers did win a trophy in one of their classic musicals, but in recent years, virtually every film about dance culminates in some kind of life-defining contest.”

It’s been struggling, even in its reinvented form. “In the 15 years since Martha’s death, funding changed, presenting changed, audiences changed, and what we rebuilt last year was based on the old model.” The reinvented group “got the Picassos out of the attic and dusted them off beautifully, but the connection to how the field had moved forward wasn’t addressed. We had a goddess up on top of a mountain and everybody came to her. But without the goddess, we’re just another mountain.”

One of London’s leading dance critics has penned an authoritative history of the UK’s Royal Ballet, and among the pleasant surprises along the way was the realization that she was researching a living history. “The Royal Ballet’s comparative youth means it’s possible to speak to people who were there in its earliest years… And it was an extraordinary generation. Besides Fonteyn and Nureyev, it had the elegant, perfectly matched Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, the sharply musical Merle Park. It had the potently dramatic Lynn Seymour, the muse of the company’s second defining choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan.”