Category: dance

So had the Martha Graham Company survived its time away from the stage? “The good news is that the tremendous effort that’s gone into keeping the company together and bringing it to this level of performance has paid off: This is not yet great Graham, but it’s intelligent, ambitious and often satisfying. There’s a platoon of young dancers devoted to what they’re doing; you can see it in the expressive and energized corps. In certain works — Dark Meadow, for one — the corps is now the strongest element. But then the famous Dark Meadow, with its step-right-up-and-stroke-me phallic impedimenta, is looking dated these days.”

The fledgling Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley has told the city of San Jose that the company could close as soon as Friday without an emergency grant of $100,000. “But a key city panel voted Monday night to deny the money, after arts groups complained that the money, from funds that had been slated for the now-defunct symphony, should be made available to all arts groups. The ballet is trying to raise $1.2 million to keep it afloat through the end of the season, in May, and perhaps give it enough time to further develop its own symphonic organization, Symphony San Jose Silicon Valley.”

A documentary about four star male dancers at American Ballet Theatre tries hard to portray them as normal guys. Too hard. Obviously the documentary-maker wants to bust stereotypes of male dancers being sissies. But to hear everyone tell it in tonight’s broadcast, dancing is just a guy’s thing. For example, “Ethan Stiefel likes to ride a motorcycle and what chiefly attracted him to ballet, he says, is the opportunity to place his hands on women’s bodies. No, no, no. Believe it or not, men in tights are drawn to ballet by a calling, a compulsion toward artistic endeavor and yes, ambition.”

With the LA Philharmonic moving out of the The Music Center of Los Angeles, dance fans are hoping to see more dance brought to town. Very little dance has been seen there for years. To that end, the Music Center has taken a baby step, bring three companies to town. “The companies are certainly worthy; for the Music Center, however, this seems a discouragingly safe and unimaginative way to begin. What’s really called for is a wake-up call to the vast, hibernating dance audience. This selection does nothing to define the place that the Music Center wants to stake out for itself as a dance presenter.”

In the American dance world, New York is the center of the universe. Every choreographer and dance company feels the need to be seen there. But a panel of choreographers meeting in Cleveland stressed the importance of making careers outside of New York. “The regional voice makes a difference. There’s a different kind of complexion to dance in Seattle, Austin [Texas], Cleveland…”

The Kennedy Center is embarking on another big project – this time in dance. “Dancegoers will get a side-by-side sampling of some of the most influential choreography in ballet history, as well as a couple of seldom-seen nuggets with a high curiosity factor.” American Ballet Theatre, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet Kirov Ballet, Miami City Ballet and dancers from the English National Ballet and Royal Ballet will all appear in programs over a two week period in March.

The 26 dancers of the Martha Graham Company are back, finishing a week in New York. They “expect to go on tour soon, to engagements that are being negotiated and should be announced in coming weeks. With a current annual budget projected at $7 million, the company is seeking at least $3 million in outside funding. Next week, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance is moving from various Manhattan locations to a building on East 63rd Street where Graham had taught for many years. The property was sold during the company’s financial crunch of the 1990s, and repurchased recently.”

Boston Ballet got great reviews, sold 600 more season tickets and posted a small surplus. But the company’s longterm finances have been shaky, and so the company is cutting staff and canceling some performances at the end of this season. “We are not treating this as a one-time emergency. We’re trying to look very closely at how we do business, how we can create greater efficiencies while enhancing our artistic quality.”

“Natalya Dudinskaya, one of the last surviving legends of Soviet ballet, died aged 90 on Wednesday. No other dancer could compare to her lightning-fast cascades razor-edge precise steps. Her dancing technique was once labeled ‘choreographic bel canto,’ a reference to the classic Italian vocal school demonstrated at its best by singers such as Maria Callas.”

Robert Tracy was Nureyev’s lover for seven year before Nureyev’s death, and for the past 10 years has refused to talk about his friend. Now he is. “He heard Nureyev talk in private about his anxieties over his fading youthfulness, about the women he had slept with, about his longing to have fathered a son. On January 6 1993, Nureyev died at the age of 53 from Aids, a diagnosis which was kept secret until the morning after his death. Tracy has never accepted this diagnosis. He believes his friend, like other gays, was the victim of poisoning by governments.”