Category: dance

Svetlana Zakharova, now 26 and a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, based in Moscow, is a remarkable onstage force. For seven years, Ms. Zakharova was the brilliant young face of the Kirov Ballet, in St. Petersburg, where she spent one year in the corps before being promoted to principal dancer; in 2003, she surprised the dance world by defecting to the Bolshoi.”

Ballet has all other artforms beat hands down, writes Charlotte Higgins. “There is no other art form that is so highly evolved, sophisticated, sublime, where absolute discipline of technique is allied with grace, beauty, sensuality and pure emotion. Ballet – ballet is another world. Ballet is about limbs and bones and muscle, about flesh and skin. It is visceral. Ballet is about what it means to be human while the blood pumps through our veins; about the things that are too strange, dense and delicate to be strangulated by human speech or song.”

Why is the classically pure Kirov Ballet turning to a maverick like William Forsythe? “The Kirov has already added works to its repertory by the St Petersburg-born George Balanchine, who died in 1983, but Forsythe’s work, with its conscious deconstruction of the ballet conventions held so sacred at the Kirov, is a much wilder departure. It was the Kirov who courted Forsythe, rather than the other way round, and it took some persuasion. Forsythe has said that traditionally trained dancers, unused to his work, can be “horrible to watch” in his pieces.”

Training is everything in the dance world, and the chance for young hopefuls to hook up with seasoned pros is both rare and intensely valuable. So as you might imagine, the Summer Intensive program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance is the high point of the year for its enthusiastic (and exhausted) participants. “For four weeks, 55 advanced dancers ages 14 to 23 chosen by audition from the Bay Area and beyond forked over (or their folks did) $1,800 tuition to study with some of the best in the business — the business of artistry.”

Can dancing the flamenco help students learn a second language? One dance troupe thinks so, and is instructing New York teachers in the fundamentals of the dance for just that purpose. “If the connection between flamenco and English as a second language seems less than obvious, it may help to think about how people communicate when they do not speak the same tongue. They use gestures and facial expressions. As students learn, they memorize the rules of the new language, including intonations and transitions. Eventually, they let go and improvise. The same elements – nonverbal clues; shifts in rhythm, speed and phrasing; and the interplay of rules and inventions – are fundamental to flamenco.”

Many dance aficianados view Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet as the gold standard by which all other companies must be judged. But even legends have to work to keep ahead of the pack, and the Bolshoi has been through some trying times in recent years as it tries to find its way through a world in which dance is evolving faster than ever, and “straight” ballet often gets short shrift. “Alexei Ratmansky is the latest artistic director to face the company’s basic quandary: how to introduce new work yet preserve the signature style and heritage of what Muscovites consider a national theater.”

How did American Ballet Theatre get to be a more interesting company than New York City Ballet? It’s an astonishing reversal — who could have dreamed it,” wonders Robert Gottlieb. “This has been an A.B.T. season that’s given us Ashton’s Sylvia as well as the best squad of ballet boys in the world — and Diana Vishneva. Perhaps even more important, the company is helping — or, at least, allowing — some of its dancers to grow before our eyes, unlike the situation at City Ballet, where talented kids roar in from the school and stagnate … if they don’t fall apart.”

Amanda MacKerrow is retiring from American Ballet Theatre this week. “McKerrow’s performance of the title role in Giselle tomorrow will cap a career of uncommon distinction. She has interpreted just about every leading role in ABT’s repertoire of story ballets… She rocketed to worldwide renown in 1981 when, at 17, she became the first American ever to win a gold medal at the famed Moscow International Ballet Competition.” She danced with ABT for 23 years.

How do you bring dance to a wider audience? You make it a hit in the popular venues, says Twyla Tharp. Her Billy Joel musical has been a breakout hit: “The musical passed the thousand-performance mark in June and still grosses nearly a half million dollars weekly on Broadway. The national tour that arrives at the Dallas Summer Musicals Wednesday has been on the road for 18 months.”

This mashing together of modern and ballet has turned into an artistic dead end. “The results are often mind-numbingly generic work in which ballet is watered down and modern dance is watered down, leaving a list of choreographic cocktails that simply never should have been mixed in the first place.”