Category: dance

American Ballet Theatre has named its school after Jacqueline Kennedy. “Her daughter, Caroline, who is currently an ABT trustee, beamed from the stage at Lincoln Center as the announcement was made during last night’s spring gala, which officially kicked off the new season.”

A kids’ ballet school in London hoping to stage a ten-minute performance based on Harry Potter characters was surprised to be turned down by the author. “We are delighted to hear of your pupils’ enthusiasm for the series but we should tell you that the rights in respect to a live theatrical or musical production are reserved to the author and are subject to a contractual hold-back with Warner Bros until 2007. It would therefore not be possible for you to continue with your plans at this time I am afraid. I am very sorry for this disappointing response.”

Tobi Tobias awards NY City Ballet’s current rendition of Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer best-in-show. “At the premiere of Liebeslieder, in 1960, they took the house lights down to half for the extended pause between the two sections. I remember sitting in the hushed twilight and thinking, This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I’ve had little cause to change my mind since, despite casts subsequent to the original one that were not quite as wonderful. To my mind, the company’s current rendition is the finest—the most coherent as an entity, and the most moving—since the ballet’s first season.”

Cambodia has a royal dance tradition that goes back centuries. But “in 1970, a coup sent Cambodian royalty into exile, and while the dance was still practiced in the palace, it became a part of the University of Fine Arts. When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975, the university was closed and all of Phnom Penh’s residents were forced to leave. From 1975 to 1979, former palace dancers went into hiding for fear that they would be executed for their association with royal traditions. The only dance and music allowed during that time were Maoist-style songs that celebrated the revolution.”

Protesters stormed the stage of the Bolshoi Ballet protesting president Vladimir Putin’s inauguration. “Seventeen protestors were arrested after invading the stage in the capital’s most famous artistic landmark hours after Putin’s investiture, for a second four-year term, in the nearby Kremlin. Five were jailed for up to a week, and more were due in court later on Saturday. The group struck during the interval of an evening opera performance, handcuffing themselves to chairs while throwing leaflets and chanting “down with Putin with monarch”.

The James Sewell Ballet, which moved its home base to the Twin Cities from New York a decade ago, has always received rave reviews and enthusiastic audience reactions when it tours around the U.S. But packed houses at home have been harder to come by, and this week, the company announced that it will be moving across the Mississippi River, from a college auditorium in St. Paul where Sewell has performed for years to the big, lavish State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. The State will be hard to fill – it seats 2,100, as compared with 656 seats in the St. Paul venue – but the company is counting on the extra drawing power of the Minneapolis theater district, as well as on research that suggests that most of their audience lives in Minneapolis and its suburbs.

Some of America’s greatest choreographers have been honored with postage stamps, unveiled at a ceremony Tuesday. Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham were recalled in words by family and associates while dancers performed some of their best-known works.”

Nine of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s 26 dancers are leaving the company? Why the exodus? According to two of the dancers, “the ballet company is not being challenged creatively — and they say that’s the fault of artistic director André Lewis.” Lewis has put the company on solid financial footing, but there is grumbling about his artistic choices.

Robert Altman’s film about the Joffrey Ballet hits the UK. “There is nothing in the British scene that quite compares with Arpino, Joffrey, or the weirdly dated choreography that the company performs. But has Altman managed to paint a more universal portrait of ballet in which British dancers can recognise themselves?”

Why is modern American dance abstract while European dance is largely narrative, asks Joan Acocella? “For the most part, our choreographers have been modernists, in the Clement Greenbergian sense. Their primary concern has been their medium, dance. While all that was coalescing over here, people in Europe were voting huge subsidies for the arts, which were part of their national pride. They were also living lives different from ours. In the First and Second World Wars, the Europeans saw their universe laid waste, as we did not. Consequently, I believe, many of them could not give up representation, narration. They had to keep talking about the modern world, trying to figure out how it turned out the way it did.”