Category: dance

A ballet based on the life of the model who posed for Degas’ bronze ballerina has opened at the Paris Opera. “La Petite Danseuse, with a cast of 60, pays tribute to the model who posed for La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime. The bronze in a white tutu is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.” Recent research about the model indicates that she was a dancer “brought up in a poverty-stricken family of prostitutes and was jailed soon after posing for Degas, at the age of 14, in 1881.”

“Perhaps even more than her fellow Kirov Ballet alumni and Soviet defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, 62, set the controversial standard for the West’s rediscovery of the Russian style as the late 20th century’s ballet boom made dancers front-page news.”

Former Bolshoi and Royal Ballet star Irek Mukhamedov is staging a ballet for the London Choildren’s Ballet. But he’s apalled at the dance training British students get. “There are still too many second-rate teachers out there who might have a passion for ballet but who are simply not equipped to give children the training that underpins real classical technique: “They haven’t been taught the correct exercises. Sometimes they really don’t know what I’m talking about. Worse still, they can’t think for themselves.”

“Exploring the human body in time-based media, artists from many fields have created works of dance and technology, among them visual artists Kiel, Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Myron Kruger, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, and Camille Utterback; architects such as Diller + Scofidio; and the Wooster Group theater collective. At the symposium, researchers converged at a choreographic intersection—an obsession with the body in space and time. Several artists described how dance has become their creative fuse, driving interactive explorations.”

Can technology help dance? A lab in New York – Dance Theatre Workshop – is working with choreographers to digure out what technology can offer top the creation of movement. “With video and the computer, I don’t have to interrupt the dancers’ creative flow. I can do the editing work on my own. . . . Of course, once the dance is [back] in the dancers’ bodies, it takes on new shapes, phrasings, and floor patterns.”

Jeanne Marie Laskas goes to the ballet and is wowed. “Do I sound wowed? No, I do not. In other arenas, when people are wowed, they shout: ‘Wow!’ Sometimes they stand up, whistle and make loud ‘Woo! Woo! Woo!’ sounds. But this is not appropriate behavior for a gloriously baroque performance hall. Instead, you are expected to sit here and watch a woman move her stunningly elastic body with a motion that is pure emotion, a bend and a twirl and a leap that has you close to tears, and you are supposed to wait. You are supposed to wait until she is done with this twirl or that twirl, and then, when an audience response is permitted, you may gently put your hands together with a respectful, though reticent, clap, clap, clap. This is bothering me. This is bothering me in a way I have never quite been bothered…”

“The Margaret Jenkins Company’s ‘Thirty Years of Dance’ may turn out to be a West Coast reality check on where American dance has been as well as where it may be going.”

“At 28, Akram Khan is the great new hope in the dance world. A third-generation British Asian, he brings vitality to cross-cultural expression, fusing Western contemporary dance with kathak, the Indian classical genre in which he trained from the age of seven. He is also renowned for building bridges between the disciplines.”

Western dance – particularly ballet – has emphasized athleticism (and thereby youth). But more and more, dancers are exploring the Asian tradition, which is less athletic, and concentrates more on the upper body. “By the time critics notice something in art, artists have almost always long since led the way. So it is with Asian dance and its impact on the West, which has by now insinuated itself into our dance vocabulary. Ballet remains popular, and rightly so: there is something thrilling about artistically inflected athletic accomplishment, and we’ll always respond to that. But feats of studly skill are not all there is to dance, and Asians know it.”

Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley has cut its budget by $1.4 million. “The company’s new budget of $4.9 million for 2003-2004 includes pay cuts for staff members, reduced operating budgets for all departments, reduced hours for some employees and the elimination of Sunday evening performances.”