Category: dance

Dance Theater of Harlem’s Arthur Mitchell and New York City Ballet’s Peter Martins, Balanchine progeny both, talk about the challenges of directing dance companies in modern times. – New York Times

Washington DC’s Kennedy Center says it runs one of the best dance series in the country. “But over the past several years the ballet program has sunk to an alarming depth. The number of subscribers plummeted more than 40 percent between the ’91-92 season and last year.” Despite highlights such as Moscow’s Bolshoi, audiences have had to suffer through “Dracula,” a commercially driven hit that gets high marks for boredom, and “Nutcracker on Ice,” “an effort by a troupe of lower-tier Russian skaters that probably cost the center about 89 bucks and looked it.” – Washington Post

Someone took out an ad supporting National Ballet of Canada dancer Kimberly Glasco in her wrongful-dismissal fight against the dance company. But the inflammatory ad says “Glasco’s dismissal was not for artistic reasons and likens it to the dismissal in 1933 of leading Jewish artists in Nazi Germany.” That’s got The Canadian Jewish Congress upset. – CBC

Ballet almost never makes it to the big screen these days. So the dance known as “Baby Baryshnikov” is happy for the new dance-centric  “Center Stage.” – Boston Herald

There’s something about movies that makes dance pop out at you. No, you can’t do some of the moves you do on a stage and make them translate. But the movie-dance tradition is electrifying. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

– to argue that an arbitrator didn’t have the right to order the company to reinstate a dancer the company fired. – CBC

The Kirov Ballet has been dancing “La Bayadère” for 123 uninterrupted years. “The staging is blessed with design as old-fashioned and as marvelous as the dramatics of the piece itself: the Kirov retains the meticulous scenery made for a 1904 production, with all the magic of painted backdrops and illusionistic perspectives, soaring palaces and abundant greenery. (The sets now in use are scrupulous copies of the originals.) The ballet also honours something sadly ignored in the current performance style of the 19th-century repertoire: the power of dramatic gesture.” – Financial Times

Paris Opera Ballet christens new Lowry Center with its own “Bayadere” For its first British visit in 16 years the Paris Opera Ballet brought Rudolf Nureyev’s staging of La Bayadère, the last production Nureyev worked on before he died in early 1993. Nureyev had already given the Parisians half a dozen stagings of the Russian classics, but this was to be his grandest vision yet for the company. – The Times (London)

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small regional ballet company or the mighty American Ballet Theater (ABT). “Swan Lake” is the classic that sets the standard. ABT debuts its new swan, plowing every resource the company can muster and a $1.4 million budget.  – New York Times

Unlike music or theater that can be written down and faithfully reproduced, dance has always had the problem of being recreated faithful to the original. “Videotaping and dance notation now augment the age-old handing down of dances from one performer to another. But what about differences in individual interpretation or even a choreographer’s different versions? Which should be the interpretation of record?” – New York Times