Category: dance

Founded in 1969, the Baghdad School for Music and Fine Arts has had a struggle. Once its students were the country’s middle class. Now, only a few handfuls of young girls attend ballet classes. “Dancing these days has become a kind of escape from the grim realities of everyday life. In our situation ballet is a luxury … The girls dream of a better life and a better Iraq.”

The dance company is out of a home after this season. The mogul – Stan Kroenke, owner of the Avalanche, Nuggets, Mammoth, and assorted sports palaces and theatres, needs attractions to fill his Paramount Theatre. “Under the proposal, Kroenke Sports Enterprises will take over the ballet and move it to the Paramount Theatre, which Kroenke has under a 25-year lease. Ballet and sports aren’t that far apart. Both require physical skills and stamina.”

“More than half of the art Edgar Degas produced during his 60-plus years as an artist depicts dancers. For his late career, the percentage rises to about two-thirds. Degas not only produced a lot of dance art, he created Western art’s most transcendent images of dancers and dance performance. It’s difficult to imagine that their radiance and authority could ever be duplicated, let alone surpassed.”

“One of the great surprises of the current Broadway season is that Twyla Tharp’s ‘Movin’ On”, which received mixed reviews and was in well-publicized trouble on the road, is such a hit. The only words uttered onstage are those of the songs and a drill sergeant’s occasional bark. The rest is told in pure dance movement, from the smallest details of everyday life on Long Island in the 1960’s to the savage roar of the battlefield. Still, it is all intensely believable to audiences, particularly Vietnam veterans. Most of the performers have come not from Broadway but from the relatively arcane worlds of classical ballet and mainstream modern dance.”

Where are dance’s new stars? “A new century has come, but where are the new voices? Where is a Nijinsky, with his blocky new look, echoing the fresh perspectives that were also energizing Picasso, Braque and Stravinsky? Where are the new pairs of eyes, the new synergies, the new conversations? Granted, it is more difficult – and costly – to break through the static nowadays than when Duncan and Graham and the like were embarking on their exploratory ventures. Yet surely artists of 100 years ago were as bound by their constraints as we are by ours. It is up to the artists of today to overcome the constraints, to claim their place in the pantheon of the greats.”

Dave Barry knows that saying he doesn’t like ballet is wrong – way wrong. But he doesn’t care. “My problem – and it’s MY problem, NOT ballet’s problem – is that, because I am culturally unsophisticated, all ballet looks to me like — even though I know there is MUCH more to it – a troupe of mincing mimes. Whatever the ballet plot is about – love, hate, joy, sorrow, the Russian Revolution, measles – the reaction of the dancers is: ‘It’s MINCING time’!”

Monica Mason has been named the new artistic director of London’s Royal Ballet. “Mason, 60, who is known affectionately at Covent Garden as ‘Mon’, has been a mother and something of an inspiration to a battered company since taking the reins temporarily after the ignominious departure of Ross Stretton. The Australian former car mechanic was forced to resign two months ago amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with some of his dancers.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov has disbanded his White Oak Project dance company and says that he will open a new performing arts center in New York in 2004. “The Baryshnikov Center for Dance, which is to have its headquarters on West 37th Street, plans to offer space to performing arts groups at subsidized rates. But he emphasized that its major program will be a laboratory in which artists will work with mentors from the worlds of dance, theater, film and lighting and costume design.”

Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, lead dancers in the Martha Graham Company since joining it in the 1970s, have been appointed artistic co-directors of the Martha Graham Dance Company. The company has been revived again after winning a lawsuit against Graham heir Ron Protas.

Dancers and dance companies are judged by their work on the stage. But the people who work backstage have another set of criteria for judging performers…Brooklyn Academy stagehands’ “relationship with Mark Morris, which dates to the early 80’s, has sparked a degree of critical discourse between them and his work; and aside from their technical strengths, they understand theater. These Brooklyn Academy stagehands have taste.”