Category: dance

“Two key staff members left the struggling Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre this week, further fueling concerns about the company’s viability as its leaders try to eliminate a $1 million debt and attract new audiences. The departing veterans include Mary Ellen Miller, who has led fund raising at PBT since 1992, and Molly Mercurio, public relations director. Ballet school director Roberto Munoz has announced that he will leave at the end of the summer, as will Gail Murphy, director of marketing. PBT, which lost its managing director a year ago this month when Steven Libman resigned, is being run by Robert Petrilli, interim managing director, and Terrence Orr, artistic director. Earlier this year, the company suspended its search for a permanent managing director.”

Ballet Arizona needs $380,000 in operating funds to make it through this season, in which the company has been homeless as Phoenix’s Symphony Hall undergoes a remodeling. And though Arizona is generally a fiscally conservative place, the state’s largest newspaper is calling for both public and private money to be directed to the ballet, which has mounted an impressive fiscal turnaround in recent years. “The Phoenix metropolitan area is growing up, ready to be a player on the world economic stage. For that role, we need stellar groups like Arizona Ballet… In the long term, we must develop a sturdier financial base for the arts in this region.”

American Ballet Theatre avoided a musicians’ strike with a new contract that “the union said requires the ballet to use only live musicians and bans so-called virtual orchestras. The union portrayed the deal as a victory in a fight by theater musicians, including those on Broadway, against the use of virtual orchestra machines, which save money over live performers.”

It’s the 200th anniversary of August Bournonville’s birth. Writes Tobi Tobias: “It seems to me that Copenhagen’s ambience is embodied in Bournonville’s ballets: the human scale; the lavishing of attention on details of quotidian life; the idea of “home”—of domesticity—as a haven of warmth, safety, and simple, incorruptible goodness; and a corresponding universe of enchantment that tends to be quaint and whimsical—unthreatening—veering as it does from the imagination’s extremes of passion and violence. To have seen the ballets in their native setting, to have experienced something (if only the traveler’s wonderstruck “something”) of Copenhagen, is to have penetrated a little further into Bournonville’s unique world.”

Broadway is booming, but what’s happened to the grand old tradition of theatrical dance? “From the galumphing knights in Spamalot, to the interminable Old Navy commercial that was Good Vibrations, to the ballroom gliding in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that brought to mind the Geritol-flavored heyday of Lawrence Welk, the choreography in musicals this season often seems intended not to capture your attention, not to illustrate the breathtaking possibilities of the human body in motion, not to make a case for dance as an indispensable ingredient in musical theater.”

A choreographer and a theoretical physicist team up to create dance of three of Einstein’s papers. “Of all the art forms that one can use to express the notion of here, now and what happens then, dance is probably the best. In some sense, there are ways you can represent equations by movement because they often describe movement. The equations and ideas in Einstein’s papers are very dynamical. Dance is better suited to the 1905 papers than any of the other visual arts.”

National Ballet of Canada sources say James Kudelka was not forced out of the artistic director job this week. Kudelka wanted more time to spend on his choreography. “You’ve got to ask yourself a question, if you are James Kudelka: ‘How many great years of choreography do I have in me? And do I take my salad years and spend them doing performance appraisals or joining in funding calls or all the other ancillary things you have to do as artistic director?'”

The National Ballet of Canada was shocked Wednesday when artistic director James Kudelka announced he would step down. “I am proud that the National Ballet is now a different company than the one I inherited and has developed its own role in the dance world, rather than emulating others. When I watch the company perform, I know that they are giving a performance that you could not see anywhere else.”

“Ballet West dancers have asked the American Guild of Musical Artists to file unfair labor practice charges against the company with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging management has refused to bargain in good faith.”

Three new ballet companies have their sights set on making a home in the Los Angeles region. But these efforts look naive to some. “Perhaps the directors of the struggling ballet companies in such communities as San Diego, Santa Barbara, Claremont, San Pedro, Anaheim and the L.A. metropolitan area ought to invite the classical newcomers for a facts-of-life session about survival in our battle-scarred ballet landscape. Even the Pentagon might learn a thing or two about strategies for existing in a constant state of emergency.”