Category: dance

“Steven Annegarn, a former principal dancer with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, has been named ballet master for the company. He replaces Roberto Munoz, who was promoted to director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater School this spring.”

The Bolshoi Ballet needed a horse for its production of Marius Petipa’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter at the Royal Opera House in London. They planned to bring one with them from home, but quarantine laws interfered. So they found an English horse to stand in, and that animal promptly injured itself. Finally, a local trick-rider provided one of his horses for the Bolshoi’s use, but the difficulties didn’t end there…

Although Frederick Ashton is the genius on whom British ballet is based, it could have been Anthony Tudor who got the crucial job. In a few brilliant years in the 1930s, between them they produced a handful of masterpieces that have endured 70 years, and will surely endure further. Ashton was making larky, sophisticated modern entertainments such as Façade and Les Rendezvous when Tudor made two ballets that were shocking in their time, for exposing emotions never talked about and opening up a rich seam of ballet that is feverishly mined by today’s choreographers.”

Jacques d’Amboise is 70, and taking the kids of his National Dance Institute to China. But he’s always teaching. Four years ago he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, teaching a trail dance to people along the way. “I hiked the whole thing. And more than that, I taught 14,000 people the trail dance. I did 40 big events, as wild as teaching prisoners in jail. That was terrific.”

It’s been some time since Boston Ballet had a successful artistic director, but Mikko Nissinen is apparently fitting in nicely in the Hub. There have been some definite crises in his two years at the helm, but by and large, Nissinen has earned rave reviews from critics and the Boston arts community. This month, the company rewarded him with a new 5-year contract.

“Concern is growing in the Russian ballet world over the fate of leading choreographer Dmitry Bryantsev, a month after his mysterious disappearance. Police in the Czech Republic have begun a search for Mr Bryantsev, last seen on 28 June on a private visit to Prague. [They] discovered his luggage and mobile phone, switched off, in his hotel room in Prague. So far they have only established that he never left the country.”

The Bolshoi fell off its shoes in London this week. “One began to regard the dancers with the sort of pity onlookers must have felt at the Charge of the Light Brigade, though this affair was certainly not magnificent. Now, we all cherish the concept of an artistic right to fail. But it sometimes seems astonishing how, in the development of a piece which costs a vast amount of money to stage, nobody at any point takes a look from the empty stalls and cries out: ‘Hang on, this is a disaster’!”

Much was made of the Bolshoi’s current visit to London – how the company has been rebuilt, and how artistically things haven’t been this good in years. Sad to report, but the new production of Romeo and Juliet is a stinker. “A lack of directorial and choreographic inventiveness allowed the piece to sink like a stone.”

The British government improbably conducted a study into the state of dance. Predictable? Funny? Ok, but the researchers actually took the time to learn something. “They heard about the funding ceiling encountered by mature choreographers, the difficulty in moving up from small to larger-scale productions that British and foreign theatres want to see. They concluded that the Arts Council’s woolly and obscure processes were at fault, that the Council should focus on excellence and leave social agendas to Government departments.”

The Bolshoi Ballet brand has been seriously degraded in the past decade. “The ballet company was booked into dubious venues – Las Vegas, the Royal Albert Hall – by dodgy impresarios; tours by troupes styling themselves Stars of the Bolshoi proved to be anything but.” Now though, the company has taken some significant steps in restoring its honor.