Category: dance

Colorado Ballet is building a new home. But it’s looking for much more than a place to stage what it already does. “The ballet plans to use this new theater for experimental, small-scale works that might be financially risky in larger, costlier venues. It hopes to expand its lineup from five productions in 2005-06 to as many seven in future seasons. At the same time, the ballet will make the facility available to other arts groups at minimal cost.”

“Jazzdance, one of the best-known, longest-running dance companies in the Twin Cities, will take its last steps in a farewell concert in April, then cease operations. Founder Danny Buraczeski is closing his nine-member company after 25 years. Buraczeski, who began as a dancer in New York, formed Jazzdance in New York in 1979 and moved to the Twin Cities in 1989… At its height, in 1999, Jazzdance had an annual budget of about $550,000, Buraczeski said. This year the figure is about $175,000.”

Ballet Pacifica, a small professional company in Orange County, California, is making a big step up. American Ballet Theatre star Ethan Stiefel has been chosen to lead the company. “He comes to Orange County with a mandate to remake Ballet Pacifica – which has struggled to survive – into a high-caliber dance troupe with a national and international reputation.”

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is one of those works of art about which the public tends to have very strong feelings, and the ballet companies that rely on their annual productions to line their coffers for the year mess with the show at their own risk. This year, the San Francisco Ballet is updating and overhauling its Nutcracker for the first time in nearly two decades, and the hope is that traditionalists won’t be too put off by the changes, innocent and unthreatening as they may be.

“The audience for ballet – between the wars, and during them too, in blacked-out studios – understood the virtue of escaping from everyday things, of vaulting over the grimy clichés of life. British ballet’s first audience knew that an hour or two in front of a blaze of talent might begin to fortify one for the blaze outside, or kindle a fire in one’s heart. It is a basic demand, but one that ballet may no longer be required to meet or even address.”

Tobi Tobias spend a day at the School of the Paris Opera Ballet and comes away dazzled. “On their own, these 16- to 18-year-old ingénues display sparkling footwork that makes you think of water drops set in play by an exuberant fountain. Their extensions fly high, as do their huge cross-stage leaps, yet everything appears unforced. The beautiful alignment in which they’ve been schooled from the start—and can now maintain even when they’re sweeping through space—has become second nature, and they’ve learned to make the correctness that governs their most complicated and difficult feats look like child’s play.”

Margot Fonteyn loved to dance, and she was perfectly fashioned by nature and temperament for the physical rigors, fiendish politics and unforgiving geometry of ballet.

When Boston Ballet saw its annual “Nutcracker” production forced out of its longtime home in the city’s Wang Theatre, many observers wondered if the company could survive in a new, smaller home. But artistically, at least, “Wang inadvertently [did] Boston Ballet and its audience a favor. As impressive as its technical wizardry and, of course, always terrific dancing were, the company’s Wang-sized “Nutcracker” had, over the years, started to look more and more remote… But for the [new, scaled-back] production, artistic director Mikko Nissinen has prepared the kind of fresh, coherent staging and (mostly) new choreography Boston Ballet’s “Nutcracker” has needed for a long time.”

Dance Theatre of Harlem is reopening its school, a few months after the company shut down to reorganize. The reopening is made possible by $1.6 million raised in the past month. A third of that amount is attributed to New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. “This remarkable institution has represented the best of New York. With its shutting down, “you could immediately sense the void.”