Category: dance

It looks like William Forsythe and his company, who were forced out of Frankfurt last season will end up in Dresden.

American Ballet Theatre has developed such a strong corps of dancers, writes Robert Gottlieb, that the company is a pleasure to follow. “We’re beginning to be able to watch A.B.T. the way we spent decades watching New York City Ballet—that is, tracking talented young dancers as they make their way through the company. And for serious ballet lovers, there’s no greater satisfaction.”

“Eliot Feld’s latest company, Mandance Project—consisting of five men and a lone woman—recently made its debut in New York with a repertory of 11 dances, all but one of them brand new.  Astonishingly, the work looks like much that Feld, a huge but inexplicably stymied talent, has been doing for the last quarter-century. The very antithesis of early Feld works like Intermezzo and At Midnight, they say no to organic flow and depth of feeling, substituting aren’t-I-clever? gimmicks for the qualities that lie at the heart of expressive dancing.”

Choreographer Mark Morris’ career has had a remarkable trajectory. ” I am doing exactly what I want, which I love. It’s way bigger than I thought it would be. I have much more presence and influence than I ever imagined I would. But, don’t worry. I’m not planning on world domination or anything like that. There is too much competition there. There are too many Americans who already have that goal.”

This week, the Alvin Ailey Company moves in to a new home. “To passersby, 405 West 55th Street may well seem just another sleek new building in New York. But to the dancers who will be moving into it on Friday, it represents something far more significant: the Ailey’s first permanent home and what the company is billing as the largest building in the United States devoted exclusively to dance.”

“The lyrical dancing style Fokine requires in his neo-Romantic vein is almost a foreign language to dancers bred to thrill audiences with their dazzling technical accomplishment, not to beguile the public by means of subtle evocation.  The combination of traditionally masculine and feminine elements in the main role makes a good chunk of the current audience uneasy, while an even larger chunk has trouble believing that anything created nearly a century ago can have the force, the significance, and the power to persuade the emotions as do the products of the present.”

A major study of dance audiences has been completed in Chicago, with researchers attempting to quantify the impact of dance on the average citizen, and to further determine exactly who is likely to attend a dance performance and why. Among the study’s findings: women are a whopping 71% of dance attendees; intellectual stimulation finishes behind aesthetic beauty on the list of reasons that attendees enjoy dance; and very few audience members can tell the difference between modern, classical, and jazz dance without labels to help them.

Cuba’s International Festival of Ballet is featuring the work of George Balanchine this year. Or is it? The festival only has official permission to perform one of the seven Balanchine ballets it is presenting, and copied the rest from videotapes. “The debate over the authenticity of these productions has emerged at a festival already hurt by the United States government’s restrictions on travel to Cuba. Nine dancers from the New York City Ballet and one from the Dance Theater of Harlem were barred from attending, making this the first time in 30 years that an American has not performed at the festival.”

Celebrating Sir Frederick Ashton’s 100th birthday, the Royal Ballet is restaging Sylvie. But the work hasn’t been done since 1965 and all but two of those involved with the production are dead. And there are few records of what the piece looked like. “Some might wonder how the Royal Ballet found itself in this situation in the first place, by failing to record the work of its founder choreographer. But notation was in its infancy at the time, and Sir Frederick himself was disdainful of posterity.”

Basil Thompson, the acclaimed former ballet master of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet and soloist with the American Ballet Theater, has died of sudden cardiac arrest at age 67. Thompson was on the dance faculty of the University of Iowa, and had recently consulted on the Joffrey’s revival of “Petrouchka”.