Category: dance

What matters above all else in ballet? Legs and feet. There’s an ideal to be attained, but that fashion has changed over the years, writes Clement Crisp.

Last year, William Forsythe watched as his Frankfurt Ballet was dismantled after it lost financial support. Now he’s back with the Forsythe Company. “Such is Mr. Forsythe’s reputation that his new company is already booked all over Europe and beyond. At 18 dancers, it is half the size of his old company, although Mr. Forsythe says he may hire guest dancers to help perform his larger works. All but one of the new company’s dancers come from the Frankfurt Ballet.”

Robert Gottlieb looks back at a season of dance that didn’t add up to much. “Large talent, of course, can’t be legislated into existence, and it’s not the fault of the Rhodens and O’Days and Kudelkas and Greenbergs that they don’t have it. But let’s not be deceived by the culture’s machinery of publicity and self-promotion or by our ardent longing for the real thing. That we have so few first-rate choreographers today is a sad fact; better to accept it than to lie to ourselves.”

A European festival of new dance shows a distinct experimental bent. “Europe, it would seem, there is a greater willingness to explore the outer reaches of conceptualism and politicization, layered with history and fraught with context. Theorizing aside, the dance was extremely elitist, for all its bows to popular dance (hip-hop) and political immediacy. This followed in the grand tradition of provocative European avant-gardism, influential and obscure. Work like this flourishes in a climate of still-generous public subsidies (at least from an American perspective) and a sympathetic dance intelligentsia, unmindful of such tawdry considerations as potential box-office appeal.”

When the Colorado Ballet announced last year that it would kick off its stay in Denver’s beautiful new opera house with an $800,000 production choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, everyone wondered where the company would get the money to pull off such a show. As it turns out, the company didn’t know, either. The ballet’s new season was unveiled this week, with no mention of the Wheeldon project, and the company’s artistic director says that the plans to stage the monumental show were hasty and “impractical.” The ballet still hopes to raise the money for the project and perform it in the 2006-07 season.

The English National Ballet is on the verge of bankruptcy and needs emergency cash to survive. But “for the past 15 years, ENB has been the least settled of the nation’s three great ballet companies, not much loved by critics, and torn between its board’s desire for box office populism and the higher aspirations of an alarmingly brisk turnover of artistic directors.” Is giving ENB more money just throwing it away?

There are problems with the current offering of the Martha Graham Company. But “to criticize certain aspects of its current season is not to dismiss the company’s achievement. It’s proved itself. Now we must hope that as it continues to expand its repertory—not with the specious products of Graham’s later years but with major works like Letter to the World and even Clytemnestra—it will grow even stronger and surer of itself. Major choreographers like Doris Humphrey who didn’t leave behind settled institutions can slip away from us. That mustn’t happen to Martha Graham—and it won’t, if the Martha Graham Dance Company holds its course.”

The Washington Ballet, embroiled in a bitter union dispute, has canceled its first foreign trip in five years because it couldn’t reach an agreement with its dancers over meal money.

“In an innovative fusion of modern dance and high technology, Tricia Brown is collaborating with a computer on “how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume …,” a 30-minute work for seven dancers and animated graphics. Ms. Brown has choreographed the dance. And the computer, driven by an artist-designed artificial-intelligence software program that responds instantly to the dancers’ movements, draws graphics that are projected on a transparent screen in front of the stage.”

The National Ballet of Canada is back touring, and after a seven year absence, has performed in New York. Being seen in the dance capital is as much about image as dance: “When Americans see that we represent world class standards in the arts, it gives us a different image than mountains and Mounties. A visit such as that of the National Ballet to the Brooklyn Academy is crucial to what we do here.” But the reviews have not been kind, and the theatre was not full. So what now?