Category: dance

“To producers of ‘The Nutcracker’ ballet across the country, the Rockettes have come to represent a more sinister phenomenon. One market at a time, from Tampa Bay to Seattle, the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular,” the touring version of the glitzy New York tradition, has moved in, threatening to take over the all-important holiday market.”

American Ballet Theatre’s fall season looked foolish before it even hit the floor, writes Tobi Tobias. But “despite follies of programming, casting, and coaching and the perennial tug between the concerns of commerce and those of art, the ABT season repeatedly delivered little miracles.”

It didn’t rock, reports Joan Acocella. “You can find dancing that is more poignant, or easier to watch, than Merce Cunningham’s, but I don’t think any choreographer in the world gives us a closer look at the truth. Beauty without reasons, and without anxiety over the lack of reasons: that may be what life was like before we started making it up. Sometimes, when I look at Cunningham’s stage, I think I’m seeing the world on the seventh day, with everything new and just itself—before the snake, and the tears, and the explanations.”

“The Royal Ballet’s Zenaida Yanowsky has been a fully-fledged principal since 2001 but, despite countless one-act triumphs, these meaty full-evening roles continue to elude her. The 28-year-old Spaniard isn’t the first Royal Ballet dancer to be principal in name only – Deborah Bull seldom got to carry a three-act ballet at Covent Garden – but Yanowsky, with her cool blonde beauty, sure technique and dazzlingly broad dramatic and stylistic range represents a serious waste of resources” writes Louise Levene.

Tudor was in the habit of questioning every move his dancers made. “You get people into a whole different mode of relating to the floor. It was quite grounded, his work. It’s really ground-breaking, somewhere between modern dance and ballet. And it had its own very specific technique. You have to break the habit of either a modern-dance or a classical-ballet approach. No, it’s this. And then you watch the dancers feel more and more and more constricted until they’re about ready to explode. Then all of a sudden, within that framework, you can tell the moment when somebody gets it. They start to either be themselves or be the character they’re trying to portray.”

Choreographer Alwin Nikolais was a multimedia pioneer. “He was a loner — he could not collaborate with anyone. He didn’t have the patience to explain what he wanted. He saw dance as a total entity, which meant he regarded sound, light, choreography and costume as part of the whole. In the beginning he called his work “total theater.” We now call it multimedia.”

Susan Marshall is back with one of the best pieces of her career, writes Tobi Tobias.

Ballerina Anastasia Volochkova has filed suit against the Bolshoi Ballet after being fired last month for being “too heavy.” “Russia’s Labour Ministry said the dancer’s firing violated Russian labour laws and called on the Bolshoi to reinstate her. But the ministry acknowledged that the final decision rested with the theatre, and the Bolshoi has refused to budge. ‘Unfortunately, I have to do it because I am seeking justice and want to assert my rights as well as the rights of other artists’.”

Bill T. Jones is not as scary as he once was. Or maybe it’s that society has finally caught up to his way of looking at the world. In any case, the 51-year-old choreographer, who stunned the dance world with his harshly political looks at AIDS, race, and religion in the early 1990s, is still producing new works, and they are still provocative, if not quite so shocking as they used to be. Simply by enduring, Jones seems to have advanced the notion that dance can be as political as any other art form to a new acceptance within the mainstream dance community.

After an “unconventional” decade experimenting with stage images, choreographer Mark Godden proved he could tell a story with his ‘Dracula.” After a long association with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he has “developed into that rarest and most desirable of dancesmiths: one of the fabled few who can create successful, full-length story ballets that put bums in seats.”