Category: dance

“A ballet master is the face of how the information gets transferred or initially introduced. It is the person who instills the confidence in dancers to go that extra mile. They’re at the front line of any artistic direction. In other words, the ballet masters are as responsible for the beauty onstage as the dancers themselves.”

A Sam Walton heir puts up tens of millions to start a dance company. The dancers get decent salaries, a new studio and a full season in which to work. So why is the company’s morale low?

Seventeen years after the death of its founder and a decade after moving operations from New York to Chicago, the renowned Joffrey Ballet lives on, and this week the company begins celebrating its 50th anniversary. “The Joffrey was the most American of [New York’s] three major classical companies in its embrace of pop culture and its youthfulness. And it was also the troupe that drew in new ballet audiences of all ages… The company is now a continual presence in [Chicago] with four two-week seasons a year. And it is moving toward establishing itself as the third leg of a classical triumvirate with the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”

Time was when ballet companies cast their roles by type. You look like this? You dance these kinds of roles. But times have changed, and American Ballet Theatre’s new season illustrates a new approach to casting, writes Tobi Tobias.

Last year Oakland Ballet canceled its season and laid off dancers because of financial problems. But this is the company’s 40th anniversary, and this weekend was opening night. “Partly to honor the history of the company, and probably to attempt to win back the loyalty of those audience members who had not taken to Karen Brown’s more adventurous programming since coming onboard in 2000, the program that ran Friday through Sunday was mostly a greatest hits kind of affair. That made it impossible to guess where the company may be going, or whether it will survive, but it was a good chance to re-examine the strengths of this plucky East Bay organization, as well as its blind spots.”

“Company officials should be more than ‘appreciative.’ They owe much to this imaginative, passionate, flamboyant, demanding, difficult, temperamental man who, in the end, gave far more than he took. Pardon the cliché, but Colorado Ballet has very big shoes to fill.”

“It has consistently paid homage to the ‘old Europe,’ but from the start it was, above all else, a quintessentially American troupe — the highly individualistic creation of Robert Joffrey (the son of Afghan immigrants who had settled in Seattle), and Gerald Arpino (the son of a working class Italian-American family from Staten Island, New York).”

“Dance revivals come in many forms and get sketchier the further one recedes in time. Music has a long-accepted system of notation; theater has texts. Dance has the memories of the choreographer (if still alive) and his or her disciples, who fan across the country and the world recreating works in which, often, they once danced. So why do them at all? In dance, we live in a time, or so many people fret, of diminished choreography: there just aren’t that many great dance-makers out there, especially in classical ballet. Hence the desire to freshen the repertory by mining the past…”

“The most extreme landscape for the art form is found at City Ballet, where dozens of works, frustratingly underrehearsed, are performed each season. Yet by the very nature of the company’s George Balanchine-heavy repertory, there is often ample opportunity for individual dancers to shine. The company, no longer the one Balanchine envisioned, has turned into the punk rock of ballet. Performances are jittery, raw, unpredictable and, at times, horrific, but at both its unprofessional worst and unnervingly beautiful best, programs at the New York State Theater are alive. You go because you can’t fathom what will happen next.”

Royal Ballet star Darcey Bussell says she’ll retire at the end of this season. “Bussell, 36, says the current season will be her last as a principal dancer with the company as she wants to spend more time with her family. ‘I have always wanted to end my full-time career still dancing the full classical repertoire at the standard to which I aspire’.”