Category: dance

“Oakland Ballet may never be entirely out of the financial woods, but at least the company has met its $500,000 ‘Keep Us Dancing’ goal to, well, keep the company dancing… The company, founded in 1965, will take the coming year off from performing in order to reorganize and prepare for the 40th anniversary season.”

A new London play celebrates ballroom dancing. “Ballroom dancing is very much back in fashion, with the success of Strictly Come Dancing on TV giving it a new lease of life. It is estimated that more than one million people regularly go to ballroom-dancing classes, while the monthly gay tea dance in Brockley in south-east London is always a sell-out.”

The Frankfurt Ballet gave its final performance Sunday night. “After many curtain calls and a few tears, the Frankfurt Ballet ceased to exist. One of the most exciting chapters in contemporary dance was over. As one troupe dies, however, another is taking shape, because a new Forsythe Company should be born in January. And it too will be based in Germany. Unlike the Frankfurt Ballet, which worked from the Frankfurt opera house, the Forsythe Company will have two homes.”

The Cleveland-based experimental dance troupe known as Sub-Atomic Frequency Modulation Overdose (SAFMOD) is facing a very uncertain future, as company veterans scramble to keep its tradition alive. “Founding artistic director Young Park and managing director Ezra Houser shocked their colleagues last spring by revealing their plans to leave Cleveland at the end of the summer and resettle in Toronto.” The couple gave SAFMOD time to find replacements for them, but its been slow going, and time is running out.

A new study of dance in the UK says that dance companies have become too reliant on public funding, and need a new strategy to survive. According to the study, “about 12% of the population went to a live dance event in 2003, with overall attendance at ballet and contemporary dance events reaching 5.1 million. More than a quarter of all adults in 2001 took part in some form of dance, ranging from tap dancing to nights out ‘clubbing’.”

The Mark Morris Dance Company’s annual residency at Tanglewood has developed into one of the more collaborative projects ever undertaken at the New England music center. “The unique aspect of the Tanglewood project is that the musicians – singers and instrumentalists alike – learn Morris’s choreography as well; they learn to put the music into their bodies in a different way. They not only rehearse one movement of the music they will be playing; they actually perform it, for an invited audience of staff, friends, and fellow students.”

Robert Gottleib is unequivocal about New York City Ballet’s unleashing of a Boris Eifman Balanchine tribute: “Eifman’s Musagète may not be the worst ballet ever put on by New York City Ballet—the last 20 years have offered it lots of competition—but its premiere last Friday was without question the lowest point in the history of the company (and I’ve been following its fortunes since the beginning, in 1948).”

The Maine State Ballet wants to convert a brick warehouse into a new performance home. “The company, which has operated for 23 years without any debt, will begin a $3 million capital campaign to pay for the new home and start an endowment fund for long-term financial stability.”

The Saratoga (New York) Performing Arts Center has raised two-thirds of the $600,000 it needs to keep New York City Ballet in residence next summer. “In February, SPAC’s board decided to drop the ballet’s summer residency, saying it was costing SPAC nearly $1 million per year. That decision was later reversed following a firestorm of public opposition.”

Fifty applicants have applied to succeed Kent Stowell and Francia Russell as director of Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet.