Category: dance

“Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet, has suggested creating a modern dance company at Lincoln Center that would be the first new cultural organization there since Jazz at Lincoln Center was established in 1996. The company would replace New York City Opera as the ballet’s co-tenant at the New York State Theater, if the opera troupe succeeds in building a new home at the World Trade Center site or elsewhere.”

“Dance/NYC recently reported that over 8,600 people work for local dance organizations on a volunteer basis—77 percent of the entire workforce in the professional dance community. Substandard conditions exist because dancers and management are unlikely to challenge them. They tend not to think of art as work or artists as workers.”

The economics of the dance world are depressing. Pay is poverty-level low, the physical demands are crippling, and success is measured in teaspoons. After looking at the New York dance world, it’s a wonder anyone would devote their life to it.

New York City Ballet returns to the Westchester estate where Balanchine’s “Serenade” was first performed in 1934. The story of that first performance is an oft-told tale in ballet history. “Much has changed. History did not repeat itself, but it was recalled in a startling context.”

Ashley Page took over Scottish Ballet a year ago as the company relaunched itself as a modern dance company. In that time, he’s reinvented everything. “Page is reclaiming the past while updating the repertoire with his own works, curator as well as creator. How Scotland reacts to this policy has yet to be determined. The Festival Theatre was by no means full, though Edinburgh audiences are notoriously wary of Glasgow-based culture, and Scottish Ballet has a damaged reputation still to repair.”

The Martha Graham Dance Company is in residence in New York once again. “The Graham legend, a mythology in its own right, contends that she combined the Puritan and the sensualist in her makeup; ostensibly this made her an authority of sorts on forbidden games. Today, forty years after the premiere of Circe, its would-be sexy parts seem dopey to the point of embarrassment.”

Boston Ballet shares something with the National Ballet of Cuba – two principal dancers. “Artists from Cuba are torn about returning or not, and the work they make in the US often addresses that inner conflict.”

The North Carolina Dance Theatre rarely gets to New York. It’s a company run by prominent Balanchinites and they have staged much of the master’s work. But not this time. Why, wonders Tobi Tobias, “did this energetic and engaging troupe ignore this heritage and offer a program comprising three pieces of middling worth only obliquely related to classical dancing?”

Bolshoi prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who was fired in September for being too bulky to be lifted by her dancing partners has lost her damages claim for £575,000 against the chief of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.

Martha Graham’s dances are hardly what one would call timeless: in fact, many look distinctly old-fashioned in the modern era. So what is it about the mystique of Martha that has made her legacy such a draw for young dancers seeking to make their mark in the dance world? A new generation of Graham proteges gives varying answers to the question, but all speak of a certain “emotional trutfulness” that distinguishes a Graham dance.