Category: dance

Boston Ballet is to announce the name of its new artistic director today. It is expected to be Marina Gielgud, the “controversial former artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet and Australian Ballet. She is also the niece of the late British actor Sir John Gielgud.” – Boston Herald

San Jose offers members of the disbanded Cleveland San Jose Ballet a chance to “test the waters to create a new ballet company in the Silicon Valley.” To make it happen, San Jose would have to raise an additional $2 million for the first season and “a high percentage” of the current dancers would have to sign contracts to make the plan work. Dancers have until today to sign contracts. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

The Kennedy Center kicked off it’s ambitious two-week Balanchine Celebration Tuesday, during which six companies from around the world will perform the whole range of Balanchine’s work. Perhaps surprisingly, “there is no sense of competition. Rather there is a sense that one company enhances another, and all confirm Balanchine’s faith in the classical ballet vocabulary as an enduring dance idiom. – New York Times

The 41 members of the Cleveland San Jose Ballet (which went bust last week and disbanded) are voting today on a plan to move en masse to San Jose and start a new company. – San Francisco Chronicle

The Balanchine Celebration Festival gets underway at the Kennedy Center. And surprise – “of the three companies represented on the program – the Bolshoi Ballet, Miami City Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago – Miami got to set the exclamation points, closing each half of the evening with high-wattage show-stoppers. Its ‘Rubies’ section of the full-length ballet ‘Jewels’ was about as dazzling as one could bear.” – Washington Post

“Until Rudi came along all a man had to do to get into the Royal Ballet was, more or less, turn up and show willing. Nureyev completely changed the pace. He engaged with female dancers, manhandled them. It was exciting, virile.” – The Telegraph (London)

The collapse and disbanding of the Cleveland San Jose Ballet was a shock for dancers/staff. Meanwhile, the San Jose board will try to extend a season there. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Cleveland San Jose Ballet has canceled its season and terminated the contracts of its dancers. Two weeks ago the company missed its payroll for dancers and staff, and officials said the 2000-2001 season would be canceled unless $1 million was raised by today. Since then, only $60,000 has been raised. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

South Africa’s major dance companies have closed for lack of funding. A disaster? Perhaps. “The other point of view is that the departure — particularly of the ballet ensemble, the management style of which was characterised by a blatant disregard for the political and artistic realities that came into play from the middle of the 1990s — is a positive move, leaving a gap crying out to be filled by the entrepreneurially and/or artistically minded. Over the next few months that gap is to be solidly plugged by a plethora of local and visiting dance companies, varying in degrees of motivation from art to capitalism.” – Daily Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg)

– culminating in the Russian president’s recent sacking of its artistic director, mirrors Russia’s countrywide troubles. “The famed opera and ballet company increasingly has become another monument to a bygone era, when the resources of an all-powerful state were poured into the arts.” – CNN