Category: dance

National Ballet of Canada director James Kudelka on the difference between Canadian and American dancers: It hardly needs mentioning that work like this is harder to do in a cold climate, and Kudelka believes that the weightier, slower look of Canadian dancers may actually have something to do with things like thicker blood and winter lethargy. ‘We’re less energetic than American dancers. Balanchine got dancers from Texas and Florida and California, where it was always summer. The bodies from the Midwest got left on the tarmac’.”

How to promote contemporary dance? How about a competition? “The idea of the Place prize is that any British professional choreographer, at any stage of their career, may submit an idea via a three-minute video. These will be tested blind by experts, and 20 will be awarded development money so they can be transformed into fully fledged 15-minute works. Then, come the summer, these 20 will be performed and an overall winner chosen. That person will get a whopping £25,000 – that’s five grand more than the Turner prize.”

The English National Ballet is canceling an ambitious new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses because of money problems and sinking ticket sales. “A shortfall in revenue from its vital Christmas season is being blamed. December’s takings from a production of The Nutcracker at London’s Hammersmith Apollo fell £500,000 short of what it could have been at the company’s home.”

American Ballet Theatre is in another fiscal crisis. “Ballet Theater’s cash reserves dropped by more than $3 million — to $3.4 million from $6.5 million — in the last fiscal year, which ended in July, according to an audited financial statement recently released to its trustees. And a more recent financial report compiled by the company for the four months that ended on Nov. 30 showed an operating deficit of $3.8 million. People with knowledge of the company’s finances say this fiscal erosion has made it difficult for the company to pay vendors and meet payroll.”

Judging from the ABT’s performance this week at the Kennedy Center, finances aren’t the only thing the company ought to be worrying about, says Sarah Kaufman. “In the dispiriting fog that Tuesday’s performance left behind, it is difficult to identify the most horrific moment… In the campaign parlance that currently preoccupies Washington, ABT has so muddied its message that it risks alienating its base. Surely ABT hasn’t forgotten who its core supporters are and what they look to this troupe to deliver. Ballet is, after all, the company’s middle name.”

Three years ago, a man looking for a dance school for his daughter, offered the University of Arizona in Tucson funds to build a new home for its dance program. “This story sounds like something out of an old Fred Astaire movie, and why not? Just looking at the Eller Theatre, designed by Gould Evans Associates in Phoenix, makes you want to tap your feet. The finely proportioned rectangular glass volume that hosts the dance studios seems to pirouette above a lush green lawn.”

“Five dancers who worked with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet gathered recently, on the occasion of his birth centennial, to discuss the choreographer. Their remarks evoked a man of demanding genius, magnetic elegance, mysterious wisdom and a fondness for joking, TV’s ‘Gunsmoke’ and pizza.”

As New York City Ballet’s Balanchine celebration wends on, Tobi Tobias laments the state of the company’s custodianship of its illustrious founder’s legacy. “The two-dimensional condition I find in many of the NYCB’s Balanchine productions is not simply physical. I’d dare to say—though now we’re getting into the dangerous realm of the intangible—that a spiritual dimension is lacking as well. Is the present manner in which the NYCB dances its Balanchine capable of remedy? Some of the erosion that has occurred is inevitable, given the absence of the choreographer as chief custodian of his work. But I’m convinced that…”

George Balanchine revolutionized the vocabulary of dance. “In short, he made ballet American, and then watched as American ballet became the official dance language of the Western world. The twist is, Balanchine and his work both became so famous they faded from view. By the time he died in 1983, his streamlined style had become so pervasive worldwide that we don’t even recognize it as his style anymore: It’s just “ballet.” On the 100th anniversary of his birth, the choreographer remains an enticing enigma.”

“Former American Ballet Theatre soloist Rebecca Wright will be the new director of the Washington School of Ballet, the organization is expected to announce today. Wright succeeds the school’s founder, Mary Day, who retires this summer.” The school says that it very much wanted its new director to be someone with an impressive performance history, rather than merely an administrator.