Category: dance

New York City Ballet is marking the 100th birthday of George Balanchine with a season of tributes. Tobi Tobias writes that something seems lost in the celebrations. “I believe that a good part of the problem is that no one is as deeply and unremittingly concerned as Balanchine once was with the nature of individual dancers’ specific personas and gifts. He was acutely conscious of such matters when he created his ballets and when he recast them over the years as well. He developed his dancers not merely in the classroom but through the roles he gave them. Nowadays, casting often seems thoughtless.”

“On Friday evening, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre will come alive with the hopes of an entire art form. Matjash Mrozewski, the 28-year-old Toronto-based choreographer who is rapidly gaining profile here and abroad, will unveil a work commissioned by the NAC for no less a purpose than getting young Canadians turned on to modern dance. It’s too early to say whether it will succeed on that lofty level, but given Mrozewski’s usual dynamic approach, not to mention the teenage focus group the NAC assembled to help guide his efforts, you can at least bet it won’t be boring.”

The dancers of Project Bandaloop work on the vertical as much as the horizontal. But once you’ve seen the ups and downs… “It’s not that the dancers can’t dance, or can’t climb, or can’t do both exceedingly well. They can. It’s that after watching them skitter up and down their riggings like spiders on steroids, and twirl and spin in midair, you’ve pretty much seen the whole lexicon. Their movement vocabulary is limited, the choreography even more so.”

As the Forsythe era ends in Frankfurt, disgrace deepens. “It’s a daft situation: not only is Frankfurt perversely depriving itself of the one arts institution which makes it internationally famous, but the city’s culture senator, Dr Nordhoff, refuses to negotiate social provision with the 50 per cent of the troupe’s members who will lose their jobs. It’s all about money, it’s very grubby, and doubtless symptomatic of increasing cynicism in the subsidised sector towards challenging art.”

Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker has been ousted from its annual nest in the Wang Center (replaced by a high-stepping Rockettes show). It is, the ballet company says, a blow against a tradition that has entertained Bostonians for generations. Maybe not – the Nutcracker tradition didn’t take root seriously around the US until the 1950s, and is only 35 years old in Boston. And while it’s a cash cow for ballet companies, there are certainly many who would not be unhappy artistically if the whole thing went away…

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her company Rosas have long inhabited the post-modernist world of alternative spaces. Buter her new work “Rain”, writes Tobi Tobias, “makes them fit for an opera house—the venue, laden with tradition, on which postmodernism originally turned its back in contempt. Such a development is both ironic and inevitable—the mainstream is a magnet for the work of its rudest antagonists—and De Keersmaeker’s piece is very handsome indeed.”

“October represented something of a turnaround for Los Angeles, a city with a reputation for failing to support dance. In sheer numbers, there were more dance performances here last month than anyone could remember — more than 50. But such activity was not a lone anomaly; there is plenty more ahead, from an ever greater diversity of companies.”

Choreographer Trisha Brown has an amazing record of getting other artists to collaborate with her. “Her 40-odd years of innovative creation and performance have brought about some memorable collaborations, most frequently with Robert Rauschenberg but also with Robert Whitman, Donald Judd, Nancy Graves, Terry Winters and Fujiko Nakaya. They have designed sets, costumes, environments, atmospheric effects and music for her. Add to these visual contributions the aural enhancements of the composers Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Dave Douglas.”

ABT watchers were buzzing Wednesday over long-time angel sponsor Movado pulling out of its support of the company. Major corporate sponsorships aren’t exactly easy to come by these days. “Movado has been a principal sponsor of Ballet Theater, one of New York’s premier troupes, for almost 20 years, giving what the watch company estimated was more than $400,000 annually. But Ballet Theater trustees said that Movado’s withdrawal would be only a dent in the company’s $35 million annual budget and that a substitute would not be difficult to find.”

China isn’t known for a great ballet tradition. Yet, writes Ismene Brown, she came away this week “dazzled” by the National Ballet of China, now “reinventing themselves after decades of Maoist chauvinism. Here are long-limbed dancers whose grace and attack are knit together with a unison you’d almost call superhuman. But what, asks the suspicious westerner, of personal expressiveness in this oppressive land?”