Category: dance

Oakland Ballet needs $500,000 by the end of the month or it will go out of business. What seemed like an impossible fundraising goal, though, is now closer. “The troupe, which had collected about $53,000, now has announced the pledge of a matching grant of $200,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Sufficient contributions to match that grant would put the ballet within $47,000 of its goal.”

“In New York, and other US cities, burlesque is back. The riotous form of musical striptease is sweeping nightspots, becoming the latest trend in entertainment. The craze is dubbed ‘New Burlesque’, but the ample flesh on display is just the same.”

Turnover is not abnormal in the ballet world, and most companies can expect to lose a dancer or two in a given year. But the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is taking a rather large hit this summer, with 9 of its 26 dancers, including two male principals, either being let go or leaving the company on their own.

“In an effort to help the Pennsylvania Ballet leap higher onto the national dance stage, company officials yesterday launched a $10 million capital campaign. It is hoped that the money, $6 million of which has already been raised or promised, will secure the troupe’s place among the country’s most prominent companies by funding more touring, more dancers, and more new ballets. The company would also like to add office and studio space, expand its artistic repertoire, and create a substantial endowment.”

“The financially strapped Oakland Ballet is breathing a little easier this week after the receipt of a major grant that, if matched, could put the company close to the $500,000 make-or-break goal it set for itself earlier this month. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has approved a $200,000 matching grant to help the company meet its goal by May 31. Because of declining ticket sales and $200,000 in debts, the company suspended its fall 2004 season and announced that if it couldn’t raise $500,000, it would go out of business.”

The Joyce Theatre in New York is proposing to build a new 900-seat theatre as a “home for dance as a cultural anchor for the World Trade Center site.” New York City Opera has a competing proposal – a 2,200-seat opera house that would be used in part for dance in the off-season.

As the Oakland Ballet struggles to reestablish itself financially, an old Oakland refrain is rearing its head: why does Oakland need a ballet/symphony/arts scene, anyway, with San Francisco’s glittering cultural landscape just across the bay? Such talk has always been a thorn in the side of East Bay artists, and the Ballet is at a crossroads that Oakland’s symphony and theater professionals have seen before.

Four years ago, two Berkely teenagers started their own dance company, recruiting their own dancers. “They did it all by themselves: choreographed the dances, sewed the costumes, even raised the funds and called around for publicity — grrrl power elevated to fine art.”

“Unlike the actor’s, the dancer’s body inevitably resists being given away. The more fully a dancer throws themselves into dancing a part, the more they come across physically as completely themselves. It is a paradox, not just of dance, but of our own existence, that often when physical being is at full tilt, the human essence seems most visible. When a dancer is giving it all they’ve got, what we see is no illusion, even if they are performing a “role”: the animating spirit cannot be borrowed or faked, it is the dancer’s own.”

Robert Gottlieb writes that one of the most interesting things about the rejuvenated Martha Graham Company is that it shows the unevenness of her work. “Since this reconstituted company emerged two years ago, after the resolution of the legal struggles that had bedeviled Graham loyalists for so long, emphasis has been placed on disinterring Graham relics from the 30’s. This has proved a mixed blessing. Although these pieces all have historical interest, without her animating presence they tend to remain curiosities—foreshadowings of the greatness to come rather than great in themselves.”