Category: dance

Now that the Martha Grahma litigation has been resolved, the MG company is back dancing. But it’s a pale imposter that does its founder a disservice. “Financial crises and litigation over the ownership of Graham’s name and repertory had left her company dangling, and its comeback proved that her ghost could be a destructive force, invoking past greatness in a way that made present achievement look both paltry and old-fashioned. Much of the dramatic power in her choreography had eroded to an alarming extent, and as a result, the whole future of the Graham legacy appeared questionable.”

Though his contributions are now mostly forgotten, George Balanchine created some vivid pieces for Broadway. “Starting with one of his earliest musicals, Rodgers and Hart’s ‘On Your Toes’ (1936), he attained a level of choreographic sophistication rarely before seen on Broadway, and all the dances were integral to the plot, a concept virtually unheard of at the time.”

“Funded by the island’s communist-run government, Cuba’s classical dance program is world-class, training dancers for a company that has performed in 58 countries and received about 300 international awards. Founded by Cuban’s living ballet legend, Alicia Alonso, in 1948, the National Ballet of Cuba has managed to forge its own style out of old Russian and Western techniques.”

The dance world was surprised last year when choreographer Donald Byrd, who had had to close down his own company, took a job running a tiny Seattle dance company. “How would someone who was used to running a major company, someone whose “Harlem Nutcracker” was a worldwide draw, accustom himself to a small troupe of dancers of varied backgrounds and a shoestring budget?”

Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s new director, has a tough job, no matter how she does it. “A director has to juggle the old or ‘heritage’ repertoire with the new; maintain the 20th-century classics as well as the 19th-century ones; import foreign successes and support indigenous efforts; and of course share out space between Ashton and MacMillan. No matter how the portions are carved out, many people in many places will be seriously displeased. Mason looks likely to be the safe consolidator, the steadying hand after the squalls of the Stretton regime. After seeking to blow new air into the Royal Ballet by appointing Stretton, the ROH Board then did a frightened U-turn by scurrying back to the old guard with Mason.”

“The audience today loves dancing, no doubt about that. What it doesn’t love is the aura of preciousness and affectation that clings to ballet. Classical ballet companies have yet to find convincing ways to erase these misconceptions and hook the permanent audience they need — and still preserve the idea of classicism. Meanwhile, other dance enterprises thrive by applying ballet’s components to performance that doesn’t intimidate.”

There are so few original ballet scores – music written specifically for dance. “So when a lost ballet by Prokofiev — one of the greatest of all composers for dance — is rediscovered, it’s cause for rejoicing.”

There’s a lot more to creating a dance than just throwing on some music and making up steps. Choreography is a finely adjusted blend of research, flair, and precision, and the thought of creating a scriptable dance is an awfully daunting one for those who have never seen it done. But if you’d like to give it a try, famed choreographer Mark Morris would be happy to tell you how he does it.

The new $40 million Laban Center for dance opens in London. “It was nonetheless a daring gamble for a small, relatively unknown institution to embark on building what it claims is the world’s largest purpose-built dance center. In the design competition Herzog & de Meuron was apparently chosen because it heeded the demands of the school. “We told them that the heart of our work is theater so the theater should be at the center. Of the six short-listed firms, Herzog & de Meuron was the only one to place the theater in the center of the building.”

Often live music is a preferable accompaniment for dance. But “most dance performances have no live accompaniment. For years, the not-for-profit dance industry has endured a battle between artistic ideals and financial practicality. The dance world has long been dealing with the same issues that were part of the recent Broadway strike. Budgets make recorded music a necessity.”