Category: dance

“Nearly three years after financial difficulties and litigation sidelined it, the ensemble re-emerges on Tuesday, when 24 company members and 4 students will resurrect 17 of Graham’s ballets — from the all-woman ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Heretic,’ created in the 1920’s and 30’s, to ‘Phaedra,’ Graham’s 1962 exercise in lust and lies, and the ubiquitous ‘Appalachian Spring’ — in a two-week run at the Joyce Theater.”

It’s 33-year-old Australian choreographer Stanton Welch. He’s “son of two of Australia’s most celebrated classical dancers, Garth Welch and Marilyn Jones. He danced with the Australian Ballet for 10 years and has been a resident choreographer there since 1995. He has set works on many of the world’s major companies.” Welch has named his mentor, Maina Gielgud, as a member of his artistic staff.

“Welch, who is considered by many to be Australia’s most successful choreographer since Robert Helpmann, will be the fourth director of the Houston Ballet. His predecessor, Ben Stevenson was director of the company for 27 years, during which he built it into the nation’s fifth-largest ballet troupe with an annual budget of $US13 million.”

Facing a $500,000 deficit, Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet has made some cuts. “The majority of cuts will be made by a two-week unpaid leave for administrative staff; the cancellation of two performances for each of the company’s mixed bills in March and April, and the postponement of a new work by Kent Stowell, PNB co-artistic director and principal choreographer, in April.”

It’s been ten years since Rudolf Nueyev died. He has a long relationship with the city of Vienna, and the Staatsoper has staged a commemoration of his career. “The programme insisted upon Nureyev as apostle of the Russian classic repertory. It is only as you consider the list of his stagings, the revisions and re-workings that constantly occupied him, that you realise the ceaseless energy, the prodigious determination to ‘do better’, that marked Nureyev’s creative life.

Dancers are often so busy working on their careers, they don’t get to university. After they retire, then what? A new program at Pacific Northwest Ballet brings the university in to dancers. The goal is to introduce dancers to college courses and help them slowly build university credit, be it a quarter at a time, for free. “What the class is designed to do is to give the students sort of a bridge between their life as dancers and their life as university students. They’re just protecting themselves in case they get hurt, or when they’re fortunate to retire. That’s a lot of life, after they retire.”

In the 40s, “Rodeo” took the dance world by storm. So what’s happened to dance with “American” themes? Some “observers might be puzzled that ballet repertories today do not have more works on American themes at a time when American companies and dancers are respected all over the world. Could it be that some dancers and dancegoers still secretly regard ballet as essentially foreign? For them, Americana may seem uncouth…”

Do dance company artistic directors need to know their ways around the balance sheets? Absolutely, says the new generation of AD’s. If not, you risk being under the thrall of the business side of the operation. “The infrastructure demands ballets that sell enough tickets to pay the salaries of the staff who sell the ballets. To break that cycle, an artistic director has to have a vision and a strategy. Otherwise, you’re trapped into doing 95 Romeo and Juliet’s to pay for one new work.”

The success of the Alvin Ailey company is one of the great ongoing stories in American dance. What explains it? A major part of the answer certainly lies in the company’s repertory cornerstone, the sure-fire Revelations, which inevitably anchors every season. This year it closed 26 of the company’s 39 New York programs, and I’m sure that every one of those performances was greeted with delirious enthusiasm.”

Artistic directors of dance companies around the world are gathering this week to talk about the state of the art. “Figures from the Bolshoi, the Royal Ballet and companies from Chile to Portugal are taking part in the think-tank to address how to develop new “classics” alongside the tried and tested favourites audiences always want to see. The three-day symposium will ask whether the companies are losing their individuality as they all perform the same Swan Lakes, Nutcrackers and Coppelias.”