Category: dance

Classical dance is not necessarily an easy sell in rural America, and you could make a strong case that a dance which is immediately gripping and enticing in New York might have no relevance to audiences in the Bible Belt. So how to get regional audiences excited about the form? If only you could combine ballet with… with… oh, let’s say, NASCAR racing?

Facing a $250,000 shortfall on a budget of $1.25 million, the Oakland Ballet has decided to scrap its 2004-05 fall season to save money. The company, which is known for the diversity of its dancers, is hoping to raise $500,000 in the next few weeks, and will focus on finding a secure financial footing before launching its 40th anniversary season in fall 2005.

“The obstacles for an aspiring choreographer are formidable: he must find not only bodies who will work with little or no pay, but also a way to show the outcome publicly. Even those successful enough to get commissions from companies are usually constrained by limited time, punishing rehearsal schedules and the psychological pressures of a looming premiere. Peter Martins, the director of the New York City Ballet, has long believed that choreographers would be making more, and better, ballets if they had the chance to work without these limitations.”

The Canada Dance Festival, the country’s largest dance event, was almost canceled this year because of a $100,000 funding shortfall. But the biennial festival will go on in June, reduced to 14 performances, “less than half its previous scope. The festival had budgeted receiving about $100,000 in private sector sponsorships and support, but its requests were turned down.”

“Former Australian Ballet principal dancer Simone Goldsmith has announced that she will dance in a new work at the Sydney Dance Company, just three months after retiring from the flagship ballet company.”

The Mariinsky Ballet has claimed its contemporary credentials, writes Clement Crisp. “For the fourth Mariinsky Ballet Festival the ballet company made its best claim for a valid modernity in a post-Soviet age with stagings of three ballets by Frankfurt’s William Forsythe. I have been watching and loving the Kirov since its first appearances in the west in 1961. I recall few evenings more significant, more assertive of the troupe’s potential and its greatness, than this, and I salute the company’s artistry in Forsythe as a logical extension of its grand academic identity.”

Molly Lynch, whyo resigned as artistic director of LA’s Ballet Pacifica after a dispute with the company’s board, has revived one of her best ideas while with the company – a choreography project. Her new program – the National Choreographers Initiative – will take place in July and culminate in a series of works created by four choreographers to be presented at the Irvine theater. “An amazing confluence of necessary resources came together in a very short period of time.” And Ballet Pacifica? The director who replaced Lynch resigned after two months, and the rest of the company’s season was cancelled.

Everyone likes Stephen Petronio, right? Tobi Tobias has reservations: “What’s not to like?  Well, I have two complaints, both of them serious.  One:  Petronio substitutes fashion (not just clothes, but lifestyle, to use a relevant trash word) for meaning and feeling.  Two:  The dancing he devises—while executed with stunning fluidity, speed, and strength—is extremely limited in vocabulary, rhythmic interest, and structure.”

“Martha Graham, Michel Fokine and other pioneers of early 20th-century dance rethought some of dance’s fundamental concepts in their rebellion against what they said was ballet’s empty virtuosity. They created philosophies and techniques of their own, giving an emotional impetus to everything physical. That dance gestures should not be assigned willy-nilly, but should have meaning, was one universal concept. Dance should be an outer manifestation of an inner life, these artists believed. This way of thinking seems to have fallen out of fashion, and has made dance that much the poorer.”

It’s impossible to separate Mark Morris’s choreography from music. “His extraordinary dance vocabulary is arguably matched only by his breadth of musical tastes. He began, in a way, in two different dance and musical worlds, simultaneously studying Spanish folk arts (after he saw a Jose Greco concert at age 8) and classical ballet. Thus began an eclecticism so vital to his eventual role as versatile post-modern experimentalist, though he, not surprisingly, rejects labels.”