Category: dance

The fight between the Martha Graham Dance Company and the choreographer’s heir over the ownership of her dances has been going on for three years now, and shows no signs of abating anytime soon. No matter which side of the issue you come down on, the question of ownership is a complicated one, and it has driven home to the dance world that explicitly defined contracts between choreographers and their companies are simply a necessity in the modern world.

“For more than 50 years the American choreographer Merce Cunningham has clung to the opposite of the notion that inspires all civilisation: holding that decisions made by chance may be just as fine as those driven by logic and feeling… Randomness, one feels, ought to result in ugliness – isn’t that what civilisation implies? Yet what Cunningham edits from this time-consuming procedure is extraordinarily graceful, even classical-looking.” At the age of 85, Cunningham is now physically infirm, and yet his mind appears to be as busy as ever, and he continues to be one of the dance world’s great inspirations to young up-and-comers.

The Place Prize awards were meant to do for modern dance what the Turner Prize does for modern art – namely, get an entire nation talking about it, for better or for worse. With a top prize of £100,000, “the idea of this biennial jamboree is to find, by means of an open entry, outsider judges and audience votes, neglected talent that the over-prescriptive Arts Council system misses. So how did the inaugural final manage to be so inferior to the best (or even the average) being produced in British modern dance nowadays?”

Boston Ballet, which had a $3 million deficit at the end of its previous fiscal year, ended the most recent fiscal year with a $650,000 operating surplus.

“New York dance had its annual gathering of the clan on Friday night at the Joyce Theater with the New York Dance and Performance Awards ceremony, dance’s equivalent to the Oscars and Tonys. Better known as the Bessies, named after Bessie Schonberg, a choreography teacher who was a mentor to many, the awards carry prizes of $500 to $1,000.” The madcap nature of the event was downplayed a bit this year, with more political musing than usual making its way into acceptance speeches.

“The Dance Theatre of Harlem, one of the most acclaimed dance troupes in the world, plans to disband its 44-member company and shut its doors for the rest of the 2004-05 season until its finances can be restructured.” The shutdown will not be officially announced until this Tuesday, but officials from both the company and the union which represents dancers are confirming the story. The company’s dance school will remain open during the hiatus, but some in the dance community are doubtful that the company’s fiscal situation is fixable.

Artistically, the National Ballet of Canada had a great year. Financially… the company finished $790,000 in the red…

A host of small new dance companies has sprouted in Cleveland. It’s a great development for fans of dance. But others wonder: is there enough of an audience to support the new activity?

Two years ago, Cleveland’s tiny Verb Ballet was on the rocks – broke and artistically adrift. Today, the company has “changed its name, achieved national recognition and expanded its personnel to 15 dancers who perform mainstream modern-dance classics, original choreography and chamber ballets for growing audiences of enthusiastic patrons. The company continues its education and outreach activities, but also takes its concert programs on tour. The budget has mushroomed to $340,000. The deficit has diminished to $5,000. How did it happen?”

“Typically, modern dancers stay with a choreographer for months, not years; and those who do stay for years do not often stay for decades. So what is it that keeps dancers performing — and performing with Garth Fagan — for 10, 20, even more than 30 years, up in Rochester, a snowy, medium-size city near Lake Ontario?”