Category: dance

Choreographer Sarah Morrison decided that pregnancy wouldn’t slow her down. So she’s choreographed a piece for herself now that she’s pregnant. Is it a pas de deux? “The improvisation is based on the idea of the psyche popularized by Carl Jung. The psyche is generated in the mind. The baby is developing in the body.”

Pacific Northwest Ballet directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell are leaving the company after 28 years. In that time they built a struggling regional ballet into one of the country’s best. So what happens when the guiding forces of one of Seattle’s primary arts institutions move on?

Alexandra Ansanelli is a young star ballerina at New York City Ballet. But she’s so unassuming and self-effacing….can you be a prima star without the ego?

For over a quarter century, Nederlands Dans Theater has been shaped by Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian, long its artistic advisor and still chief provider of its repertory. But, judging by its opening program of a two-week New York run, Tobi Tobias writes that “the choreographer has abandoned the rooted-in-the soil-eyes-on-the-stars mode in which he forged his reputation for the sex-cruelty-and-angst-as-gorgeous-visuals realm that we know best from high-end fashion photography of the last decade.”

Southern California’s Ballet Pacifica isn’t dead after all. The company is going to present a new story ballet and is looking for a new artistic dirctor. “This is the first news about the future of the 42-year-old chamber-size ballet troupe since late January, when Christina Lyon, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, resigned as artistic director. Lyon had been in the job only seven weeks. Her departure came just days after the board canceled Ballet Pacifica’s spring repertory season and its respected Pacifica Choreographic Project.”

Dance is big business in New York City. “A first-ever study of dance’s economic impact on New York City shows a quarter of a billion dollars in direct activity and over $400 million total in 2002-2003. The report also states that over a million paying patrons attended NYC dance performances in 2002.”

“Dance Masters of America, a national organization for dance educators formed in 1884, is one of the largest promoters of dance competitions in the country. Last year more than 5,000 dancers age 7 to 25 competed in Dance Master competitions nationwide.”

More than any other performing art, dance is dependent upon the memories of its practitioners to keep its history alive. There may be an extensive vocabulary used to define the basic positions and steps of classical ballet, but there is no perfect way to write down a dance in order that future generations might dance it again. “Even today, despite the advent of video, a choreographer without disciples is in constant danger of having his work fade away after his death. Video can capture the external form and movement, and notation the positions, but the philosophy and technique of the great choreographers is impossible to get down.”

Other than New York, the most important and vital dance center in the U.S. is… Minnesota? So says former Dance Theater Workshop executive director David R. White, who moved to the Twin Cities last year. “In terms of the work that emanates from the Twin Cities, the receptivity of the community to dance and people’s perception of the area as a progressive place where dance can take root, the Twin Cities always have been perceived as a strong community for people in dance who also care about their living environment.”

Dancing is a young person’s activitiy. But two forty-something dancers in the Joffrey Ballet, who take the floor daily with dancers half their age, credit their longevity to…