Category: dance

Colorado Ballet has cancelled six performances of this year’s Nutcracker. “These performances had been showing poor ticket sales, and their cancellation will save the company the labor and rental fees owed the city. The company is currently paying down debts incurred from engagements this season and last at city-owned venues.”

Mark Baldwin has transformed the Rambert Dance company since taking over. “Under Baldwin, the company has won half a dozen national awards, bigger audiences and critical acclaim for its overhauled repertory. On top of this, he is spearheading a fundraising campaign to get the company relocated to a shiny new base on London’s South Bank. It has been a terrific directorial debut.”

The new Baryshnikov Arts Center opens. “More than anything, Mikhail Baryshnikov intends the center as a meeting place. ‘I wanted to bring people together in an informal way. So many collaborations in the theatre, it’s just some producer thinks, Well, this guy had a nomination for Emmy, so, O.K., let’s have him. But it doesn’t have to be well-known choreographer. Could be fair chance given to a young person. I think better collaborative juices grow when people meet on free turf. You’re a poet; I’m a filmmaker. You’re a choreographer; I’m a playwright. People see each other’s work and exchange telephone numbers, and that’s how it starts’.”

Why did Indianapolis’s Internationale Ballet go out of business? Insufficient ticket sales, a decline in donations, rising expenses and the lack of an endowment. “The sad thing is we are at a time when Indianapolis has an appetite for something other than sports. And when sports can get the support of government, what you have is a situation where, in many ways, the commitment to the arts is expressed more in words than in actions.”

Indianapolis’s Ballet Internationale has shut its doors after 32 years in business. Its affiliate academy and satellite operations closed as well. “After a comprehensive review of the organization’s financial situation, the board determined that Ballet Internationale is not viable in Indianapolis under the current structure. A bankruptcy filing would be forthcoming.”

Dancers of the Colorado Ballet have filed a petition to unionize. According to the petition, the ballet “unit” (those joining the union) would consist of “all non-managerial, non-supervisory artists: dancers, choreographers, stage managers and their assistants.”

Three years ago, choreographer Donald Byrd left New York to take over Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theatre, a small community company. Many were surprised Byrd would take on a company with little reputation, but in three years he has transformed Spectrum, and last week scored a hit, bringing the made-over company to New York where it earned enthusiastic reviews.

“Dance Theater Workshop is hardly the only important center for dance in New York City – a town that, despite complaints about rents and impoverishment and the diaspora to the outer boroughs and challenges from other world cities, seems actually to be in the midst of a bustling renaissance of creative excitement. But if not alone, the workshop has become increasingly important… Week in and week out, Dance Theater Workshop has become an increasingly reliable brand name for what is new and exciting in dance today.”

A leading figure in UK dance says that the next generation of British ballet dancers is being cheated of the training they deserve by a politically correct society and the health and safety laws that go with it. Jeffery Taylor charges that “teachers are no longer allowed to touch or manipulate young dancers’ bodies into the correct positions – to straighten their backs, legs or arms – because of fears that they could be accused of sexual harassment… Teachers won’t criticise you. They say all the students are as good as each other, that they are equally wonderful. It’s obviously not true.” Taylor’s comments came as the shortlist for the UK’s National Dance Awards was released – a list that, for the first time ever, included no native Britons.

Andrew Dickson isn’t terribly impressed with Jeffrey Taylor’s theory that laws preventing dance instructors from touching their charges are killing off the art of dance. “I wonder if laws preventing children from being turned into hobbling wrecks – even artistic hobbling wrecks – are really all that terrible.” And one dance critic says that “People like Jeffrey Taylor would be the first to criticise if dancers at the Royal Ballet ended up injured because they were being pushed too hard.”