Category: dance

The San Francisco Ballet has tapped frequent guest conductor Martin West to be its new music director, replacing Andrew Mogrelia, who stepped down after only two years in the post. West “is the former principal conductor of the English National Ballet and has served as music director of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society. He has also conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Halle Orchestra, the London Concert Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra.”

A U.S. District Court judge in New York has found that seven Graham dances — including the seminal works “Embattled Garden” and “Phaedra” — belong to the center rather than to Ron Protas, Graham’s personal heir.”

“Tap dancers no longer travel across the country to do battle. They do travel, however, to tap festivals in the summer. The festival has become a major vehicle for tap’s survival, offering classes, merchandise, showcases and performances – an answer of sorts to the vaudeville circuit and the big-band era.”

“Stepping back in time is an experience much more available to actors and musicians than it is to dancers, most of whose history lacks a written literature and has vanished, step by step, into the mists of fading memory. Except in Denmark. There, the 19th-century ballets of August Bournonville are part of daily dancing life… When Bournonville retired in 1877, his half-century dominance of Danish ballet threatened to diminish slowly. We can thank one of his dancers, Hans Beck, who documented the step designs in the early 1890s, for giving succeeding generations the basis for preserving Bournonville’s training program and, with it, the means to dance his ballets properly.”

Karen Kain, arguably Canada’s most beloved dancer, will be appointed artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada. “Ms. Kain, 54, succeeds James Kudelka, whose surprise resignation from the post last month takes effect June 30. Mr. Kudelka has said he wants to spend more time creating ballets and less time dealing with the administrative headaches often associated with the job. For seven years, Ms. Kain has been the company’s artistic associate under Mr. Kudelka.”

Krumping is “equal parts break dance, pantomimed battle and demonic possession. As break dancing did 25 years ago in the South Bronx, krumping arose spontaneously some time in the last decade in neighborhoods in Long Beach and throughout South Central Los Angeles. And, just as break dancing was confined at its beginnings to a fragment of a New York borough then in ruins, krumping is still mostly unknown beyond the freeways that border these ragged areas of L.A. Over the past five years or so, though, a phenomenon that began with a handful of dancers has grown to include perhaps a thousand dancers and at least 80 independent crews, loosely organized and all part of a network connected informally but intricately by word of mouth.”

Suzanne Farrell on working with dancers on staging Balanchine’s Don Quixote for the first time since 1978: “Somebody did it for me when I was young. All I had to concentrate on then was dancing and being the best I could be. Now it’s my turn, so they can be the best dancers.”

Tobi Tobias is back from Danish Ballet’s Bournonville Festival in Copenhagen. “Whatever quibbles one might have over some of the artistic choices (and I have several fairly serious ones), this Festival was a triumph simply as an event, and [director Frank] Andersen, though he has continually given ample credit to the stagers, dancers, coaches, teachers, and staff “without whom,” was the leading force in bringing it about.”

“In the shadow of the 1905 Russian Revolution, the tardy Romantic Michel Fokine rejected the ballet spectacle of Marius Petipa, with its numbers and entries, for a new kind of ballet that would “restore dancing its soul,” he wrote in a manifesto. “We must abandon fixed signs and devise others based on the laws of natural expression.” He made the dreamy mind the protagonist of three of his most enduring works…”

The troubled English National Ballet is close to getting a new director. “Harold King, 56, is viewed as a possible saviour of a company that had to be bailed out last summer by the Arts Council with a £2.3 million rescue package and which is said to be still struggling financially.”