Category: dance

Ohio Ballet is picking up speed lately after a “rough transition since 1999, when founding artistic director Heinz Poll retired and his successor, Jeffrey Graham Hughes, took the company’s reins. Turnover in personnel has been high, attendance at performances low. But such problems are not unusual for a dance company that makes dramatic changes in leadership style and artistic product.”

With stage plays being adapted from movies, dance is being adapted from… opera. Ismene Brown isn’t impressed with Northern Ballet’s latest effort. “This is the way the art of ballet will end, with a sentimental whimper, an easy tear in its eye, and not a squeak of true life as theatrical dance. If the novelisation of successful movies is thought a pretty bogus form of literature, how much worse is a balletisation of an opera masterpiece such as Verdi’s La traviata.”

Dmitri Briantsev, 57, the artistic director of Moscow’s Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Ballet (considered the city’s second-best dance company after the Bolshoi), stepped out of his hotel near Wenceslas Square in Prague last June 28 and has not been seen since. He presumed to be a victim of crime.

One of the measures of greatness is how much an artist influences those who come after him. By that measure Alvin Ailey has ensured his place in dance history: he’s “spawned at least five major companies built in the Ailey image — Philadanco, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble in Denver, Lula Washington Dance Theatre in Los Angeles and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company — and many small groups, inspired by Ailey’s success.”

“Last week, former ballerina Dame Antoinette Sibley announced that the future of British ballet looked bleak, pointing to a lack of home-grown principals in British ballet companies: two out of 16 at the Royal Ballet, two out of 12 at English National Ballet and three out of 12 at Birmingham Royal Ballet. She also quoted what she called “shocking” figures from the Royal Academy of Dance showing a 67% drop-out rate of students at age 10-11. Is this really so surprising? After all, this is the age for dancers when the hard work really kicks in, and clothes and boys start to seem more appealing to many girls than pliés and pointe work. Not to mention that the stick-thin physique that dancers strive for is often thwarted by the development of womanly curves.”

How do you build a new audience for dance? “Creating an environment where experimentation can flourish requires rethinking dance appreciation from the bottom up. It requires expanded school field trips and in-class curriculum where dance is seen as an integral part of world history, public television broadcasts and dance in other free media, lecture-demonstrations, explanatory pre-concert talks, sophisticated program notes and a return to serious, in-depth arts criticism that recognizes that the arts deliver the news the culture tells about itself — whether that work is presented for one ephemeral night or enjoys a lucrative, year-long run.”

Reflecting a society in flux, professional modern dance has spread beyond Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai to attract budding choreographers in universities in other provinces. True to the essence of modern dance anywhere, it is no longer limited to one kind of movement idiom or aesthetic.

“New research from the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) has found fewer children over the age of 10 are attending ballet classes and taking exams in the discipline. The organisation blames the growing popularity of computer games and other changes in lifestyle. And there are fears that if the trend is not reversed, there could be fewer British ballet stars in the future.”

“Woman is the goddess, the poetess, the muse,” Balanchine once said. “That is why I have a company of beautiful girl dancers.” Would he have been happy, in that regard, with the current company? There are some very attractive women (and men, but Balanchine cared less about them) in today’s City Ballet. Yes, when he came to the United States he sought to make a company of all-American dancers, fresh-faced and perky. But some of the company’s biggest female stars now are spectacular dancers without being spectacular beauties. Is it merely sexist to lament that the current roster is not “a company of beautiful girl dancers?”

Days after appointing a new interim managing director, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has decided not to pursue its effort to force the company’s pit musicians to accept an immediate 50% pay cut. The cut, demanded by the company last year, would have necessitated the early reopening of an existing contract, and would have fixed the musicians’ pay well below the per-performance rates required by the venue in which the PBT performs. Both sides now say that they are working towards a new long-term contract for the musicians.