Category: dance

Dancers love a nice pair of new shoes as much as anyone. But you’d never know it by the way they treat them. The process of “breaking in” a new pair of pointe shoes begins with ripping them apart, and taking a knife to the innards. From there, it’s up to the individual dancer, and some are more, ahem, aggressive than others, but let’s just say that Krazy Glue and nails are frequently involved. And when all else fails, you might as well try slamming the shoe in a door hinge a few times before you strap it on. Pretty brutal treatment for such delicate-looking apparel? You bet. But when you spend your whole career on your toes, you’d better be comfortable.

With touring holiday Rockettes shows fanning out across America, many ballet companies are worried their audiences for Nutcrackers will be eaten up. But is it happening? The answer is complex and not entirely clear. “The discussion going on among ballet executives nationwide is a slice of an issue facing all arts leaders trying to grow audiences. Will the arrival of a new facility or show in town make the entire audience of arts patrons larger? Or does new competition simply ‘cannibalize’ existing audiences?”

It’s the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight, and the Dayton Ballet had the idea to celebrate the feat in movement. “Certainly the subject of the human body’s sloughing off earthly shackles to claim air as its element is apt for dance, given the art’s constant challenge to gravity’s pull and its ecstatic emotional dimension, often equated with soaring.” But Tobi Tobias wonders if perhaps the commissioned choreographers interpreted their guiding muse a tad loosely?

Jennifer Fisher’s new history of the Nutcracker demonstrates that the piece is no “monolithic artifact. Since its first production, which was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1892 for the Mariinsky Theater (now home to the Kirov Ballet and Opera), it has become a theme to be riffed upon as much as a masterpiece to be preserved. Fisher believes that when it ” immigrated ” to this side of the Atlantic in the 20th century, it began a versatile career as a conduit for psychological, artistic, ethnic, and community aspirations as diverse as North America itself.”

When Ashley Page was asked to take over the Scottish Ballet, his demands were uncompromising: “His bottom line was that he had no interest in running a cut-price Kirov or Royal Ballet. He envisioned Scottish Ballet as a small, flexible ensemble capable of performing modern dance and contemporary classical works. He wanted to be able to stage the neoclassical masterworks of Balanchine at one extreme and the austerely postmodernist choreo-graphy of Trisha Brown at the other. To drive this vision, however, Page insisted he would need a larger budget and “a major clearout of the existing dancers”.

“Once upon a time it was easy to defend the orthodoxy of the Balanchine style in practice. It was on stage with the master’s imprimatur at the New York State Theatre. Things are not that simple anymore. Suddenly, Balanchine is everywhere. And his dances simply don’t look the same on Martins’ New York City Ballet, Tomasson’s San Francisco Ballet, Mitchell’s Dancer Theatre of Harlem, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet or in Villella’s own Miami City Ballet.”

“When Matthew Bourne was on the way up, it was generally accepted that what he did was choreography. When his 1995 Swan Lake became a huge success, however, dance critics began to say that he was not a choreographer but a director. The (sniffy) implication was that London is full of mere directors, whereas the world has few true choreographers. That Bourne was proficient at arranging a piece of theatre was not to be denied; but how efficient was he at making a dance?”

A new history of dance in the 20th Century takes an unusual line for a history book. “Although everyone will be using the book for reference, Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick have produced a work that is completely unlike a standard reference book; you don’t just look things up in it — you read it. Here is a coherent, reasoned and entertaining chronicle of dance performance in the West over the hundred years that are unquestionably the fullest and most complicated in the long history of this fragmented and elusive art.”

Oregon Ballet Theatre is fast being made over into a Balanchine company. “For OBT, long known as a haven for contemporary pop ballets, it’s a radical shift. And Christopher Stowell, the company’s first-year artistic director, is doing the shifting.”

This fall, five dancers from the Ballet Nacional de Cuba leftr the company during an American tour to seek asylum “Since November of last year, they said, a total of 20 dancers have defected in Mexico, Spain, the Dominican Republic and, now, the United States. The troupe had about 90 dancers before the defections. The company and the government have taken steps to stop the exodus. The dancers described a summer meeting in which Abel Prieto, the culture minister, announced that the ministry was considering allowing some dancers to work with foreign companies, which would give them international exposure.”