Category: dance

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, struggling to cut costs, has decided to ditch live music and use recordings, to save $500,000 this fall. “This isn’t something we like to do. You want to have a ballet company in Pittsburgh? This is what needs to be done. Just because you’re an arts organization doesn’t mean you can’t make a business decision. You have to live within your means.”

There’s no dominant Downtown dance style in New York right now. But a group of surrealists is worth paying attention to, writes Joan Acocella. “As yet, none of them have performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the major channel by which downtown work meets uptown ticket buyers.”

“Jock Soto, leading dancer of the New York City Ballet, has taken partnering into realms of sleight-of-hand undreamed of before him. Short and solidly built, inscrutably dark-featured, half-Navajo Indian and half-Puerto Rican, this man does not resemble the usual slender-lined ballet prince, yet throughout his career ballerinas queued up to be partnered by him, and when he gave his final performance at the age of 40 last month in New York’s State Theatre, they were queueing up again, to shower him with red roses.”

The Bolshoi comes to New York. Has the company regained its former glory? “To judge from this engagement, the Bolshoi has hardly lost it but has a way to go to regain it fully. Whatever the company’s repertory of brand-new ballets may be, or may become, could not be assessed. The four ballets seen here amounted to four different ways of looking at the past.”

Susan Marshall is one of America’s best choreographers. But she can’t pay the rent to produce her work. So she asks for money and works leaner. “The plea for funds essential to her company’s projected 20th-anniversary season at Dance Theater Workshop next spring tells prospective supporters exactly what their contribution will buy, while it reveals the high cost of making dances: $100 pays for a single day’s use of a studio; $1,000 puts a half-dozen dancers into the studio for a day; $10,000 commissions a new (short) dance. Poetic richness coupled with economic poverty – this is the state of dance in America. ‘I look at it as a challenge to be embraced.’ The financial straits, which clearly dictate working ‘smaller, tighter, faster,’ as Ms. Marshall puts it, support her present artistic impulses.”

Contemporary dance in Seattle had its heyday in the 70s. But there are signs that the dance scene might be improving, centered in a dance hall in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood…

Boston Ballet has promoted seven dancers for the upcoming season, but the personnel changes are nothing like the upheaval that occurred after artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s first season in the Hub. “When the upcoming season opens in October with ‘Cinderella,’ 37 of the 45 dancers on Boston Ballet’s roster will have been brought in by Nissinen.”

“Exotic ballets may have been massively popular in their day – “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” was performed more than 100 times during Petipa’s lifetime. But when they die, shouldn’t we take that as a sign? “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” was buried in 1928. The Soviets must have been embarrassed by its celebration of grandeur built on the backs of slaves. Shouldn’t we be, too? Or, as with Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” does a vein of gold pulse beneath the dumb surface? This is a huge question for our major classical ballet companies, which have the resources to consider reconstructions, “imaginative” or otherwise.”

The San Francisco Ballet ran into some bad luck on its European tour, courtesy of Mother Nature. Cold, rainy weather cancelled two performances in the first week alone, and the opening night, before an audience of ultra-knowledgable Parisians including the wife of President Jacques Chirac, was very nearly rained out. Still, the tour has by all accounts been a success, and French audiences have been very receptive to the company’s traditional approach to dance, despite the unpopularity of the cancellations.