Category: dance

Ismene Brown goes looking at the UK’s leading ballet school performances to see what talent is on the way up. “I saw no stars this summer, nor did I emerge from the four shows with huge optimism about the next British generation, because there are so pitifully few native dancers-in-waiting in the first place. The heavy dominance of our dance schools by foreign youngsters is not just because they are willing to pay the fees but because they are better trained earlier on and often hungrier.”

Carlos Acosta has dance all the “big classical roles of the Royal Ballet’s repertory – Siegfried, Albrecht, Basilio – are in the bag. He’s conquered the Nureyev role in Apollo. He’s even wooed La Fille mal gardée. He’s pegged for 25 shows a year at the Royal, and the rest of the world wants a piece of him too. Yet for all his extravagant successes, Carlos Acosta is not content. He is ready to confess in his sensuous Cuban drawl that ‘ballet is started to feel a lil’ bit small for me’.”

“Like Mikhail Baryshnikov or Michael Jordan, Savion Glover has raised the technical baseline of his field: maneuvers once extraordinary are now commonplace. Such technique, especially speed, is often overused, but the greater threat is over-influence. Dancers understandably want to model themselves after Mr. Glover, but merely to imitate him would be to betray the example he’s set — the way he absorbed the styles of his mentors and forged his own, as they had before him. Despite his frequent deference to both predecessors and contemporaries, the press often treats him as the only tap dancer worth noticing. Such attention (and its financial fruit) encourages imitation, yet even without it, Mr. Glover’s reinterpretation of tradition is compelling enough to obscure other options.”

A new film by Robert Altman about the Joffrey Ballet puts a new spin on filming dance. “Working with director of photography Andrew Dunn, Altman often shoots from unusual angles, tracking gracefully from head to toe, for instance, or elsewhere using noteworthy crane shots and other devices to bring the viewer arrestingly, literally inside the dance.”

It’s been a difficult few years for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The company has gone through four managers in the past decade, and its financial fortunes have been shaky. There have also been questions about the RWB’s artistic future as it made difficult transitions from longtime artistic director Arnold Spohr..

Lewis S. Ranieri, became chairman of American Ballet Theatre last August after “pledging $2 million to the company. While chairmen typically contribute to a cultural institution’s general operating fund, Mr. Ranieri has personally paid for specific expenditures, including increased marketing, dancers’ housing, consultants’ fees and bathroom renovations at the company’s headquarters. Chairmen usually do not work on the premises of their arts organizations, but Mr. Ranieri created an office for himself out of a dance studio at Ballet Theater’s Manhattan headquarters — he pays the rent for his space — where he puts in time almost every day despite his job as lead director at Computer Associates on Long Island. Mr. Ranieri’s unorthodox approach raises questions, arts executives say.”

John Parry is disappointed in the new Twyla Tharp. “Post-millenial Twyla Tharp is a reinvention I’m struggling to come to terms with. Her new chamber group, formed in 2000, is different from previous companies, and her latest work seems influenced by her successful Broadway show Movin’ Out. No, she’s not selling out but she is selling her dancers short on content, if not on aerobic workouts.”

If you get up to dance in a New York City bar, you’re breaking the law. “Call it whatever you like—writhing, shimmying, bumping, grinding, ‘the white-man’s overbite’ — but if three or more people are executing it in a bar, nightclub or music hall that does not have a valid New York City ‘cabaret’ license, the establishment will be fined. If such “violations” occur again, they can be padlocked.” Now the city is thinking about revising the 77-year-old law…

“All in all, things are looking up at New York City Ballet. Despite the erosion of detail evident throughout the Balanchine repertory (due, needless to say, to lack of appropriate coaching), there are at last enough strong ballerinas in place so that a number of Mr. B’s ballets are looking better than they were. And that’s what City Ballet is all about, pace Martins’ often-stated dictum that the company mustn’t become a museum. City Ballet is a museum, the central Balanchine museum, as the Prado is for Goya.”