Category: dance

Where are the dance stars of tomorrow coming from? Likely the School of American Ballet. And a good place to go potential-spotting is the school’s annual workshop performances, writes Tobi Tobias. “Perhaps never again in their lives will they be so vulnerable and so beautiful. The perilous beauty of adolescence is evident everywhere at Workshop, all the more vivid because of the young performers’ unswerving dedication to the standards of mature professional artistry.”

Choreographer Ping Chong’s latest work is guaranteed to provoke thoughts about the recent Abu Ghraib torture scandal, but it wasn’t designed that way. The actual subject of “Blind Ness: The Irresistable Light of Encounter,” which premiered this spring in Ohio and moves to New York this week, is the brutal but century-old maiming and killing of Africans in the Congo by an occupying force of Belgians. But Chong has a history of creating provocative works, and the apparent American policy of torture and intimidation in Iraq makes the performance resonate like a national gut punch.

The Royal New Zealand Ballet has had a great year. Attendance is up 38 percent over the previous year and “the Ballet has turned around its fortunes since the financial crises of the 1990s. Subscriptions have tripled in the three years since 2000.”

“The preposterous-sounding truth is that, in terms of numbers, if not perhaps artistry, the foremost tango country in the world is actually Finland. The most startling proof of tangomania in Finland is the annual festival in Seinajoki, in which more than 150,000 people take part. The highlight is a tango-singing competition, which is televised, and the winners, the Tango King and Queen, become overnight stars.”

“With dance companies often scrounging just to meet the electric bill or pay their staff, why opt for the expense and trouble of live music? To Mark Morris, the proof is in the performance. “That’s my own experience, dancing for other people. If the music is taped, your heart sinks when you’re doing the dance for the 150th time, and it doesn’t vary’.”

“The financially troubled Oakland Ballet has given itself another month to raise the $500,000 it needs to keep from going under. And it has laid off two staff members as part of its bare-bones survival plan. In April, the respected company, which has a $250,000 debt, canceled its fall season, didn’t renew the contracts of its 22 dancers and announced it would fold if it couldn’t raise $500,000 by May 31. So far, the ballet has raised $300,000…”

“It’s remarkable how prevalent is the assumption that dance draws up its skirts in panicked withdrawal from anything resembling real life. In the arena of sexual politics, for instance, there is no art form better equipped to portray the physical dynamics of relationships or to confront the issue of body image. In fact, rewriting the roles of men and women has been one of the major choreographic projects of the past 100 years.”

From an artistic standpoint, Dance Theatre of Harlem has never been stronger. But behind the scenes, the company “is in financial tatters. It is $2.5 million in debt. The staff was laid off in March. The board of directors has dwindled to two members aside from company co-founder and artistic director Arthur Mitchell.” Mitchell is preparing to step aside at the board’s request, and is reportedly close to hiring British socialite and arts patron Janet Boateng to run the company, a controversial move, since Boateng “appears to have no previous history of turning around a troubled arts entity.”

Northern Plains Ballet, which had hoped to become the flagship dance company of its region with productions mounted in multiple cities throughout the Northern Plains states, has announced that it will cut the cities of Sioux Falls (SD), Grand Forks (ND), and Billings (MT) from its schedule in future seasons. That leaves the company with performances in only Fargo and Bismarck, North Dakota, and a possible staging of The Nutcracker in Aberdeen (SD). Extremely low attendance and revenue shortfalls were cited as the reasons for the cutbacks.

There was an uproar last year when German officials announced they were closing Ballett Frankfurt to save money. The company’s well-regarded director William Forsythe isn’t sitting around though. “Forsythe plans to form a new, smaller ensemble soon, and Ballett Frankfurt will cease to exist in August.”