5 replies to this topic

[Dale]

It's already been announced that NYCB, as well as the dance and broadway worlds, will be honoring the 10th anniversary of Jerome Robbins' death in 2008.  I figured we can start posting events and items here.  

And in Monday's article in the New York Sun, there was this bit of news:

Quote

Now, on the eve of the 2008 Jerome Robbins Festival, two young dancers are doing their part to see that his legacy endures by turning one of Robbins's most accessible but least frequently performed ballets Â-- his 1958 "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz" Â-- into a film, "Opus Jazz the Film." The project, an ambitious undertaking by two 26-year-old NYCB dancers, Sean Suozzi and Ellen Bar, marks the first dance film since Robbins's masterpiece "West Side Story" to be granted the support of the Jerome Robbins Trust. And it may show a new way to transmit and translate dance to a general audience.

http://www.nysun.com/article/60366

[Dale]

According to a piece in Sunday's New York Times, NYCB will be reviving Brahms/Handel next year:

Quote

Then, in June, New York City Ballet revives “Brahms/Handel,� the ballet she choreographed with Jerome Robbins in 1984 for the company. Not seen since 1991, this cascading dual-torrent ballet — its cast is divided into two separate troupes, each led by a virtuoso ballerina resplendent — used to seem like the only masterpiece created for City Ballet since the death of Balanchine. Here’s hoping it will be as ebullient again.

More about the festival:

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The 10th anniversary of Robbins’s death will prompt celebrations across the country and around the world: Robbins triple bills at San Francisco Ballet (March 8-19) and Pacific Northwest Ballet (May 29 to June 8); the Royal Ballet in London’s first revival of his “Dances at a Gathering� in more than 31 years; and, at New York City Ballet, a Robbins-based spring season featuring no fewer than 30 ballets, the largest-scale celebration anywhere of any single choreographer’s works other than City Ballet’s 1993 celebration of its founding maestro, George Balanchine.

[drb]

Wow!  Thanks for the great news of the return of the Tharp/Robbins Brahms/Handel!  Tonight I'll be dreaming of a Mearns/Garcia pairing as Ashley/Andersen (I'll save Ashley Bouder for that fabulous Calegari entrance).  With all that Robbins, I hope NYCB fills in the gaps with as much prime Balanchine as possible.

[bingham]

Dale, on Sep 7 2007, 10:08 PM, said:

According to a piece in Sunday's New York Times, NYCB will be reviving Brahms/Handel next year:

Quote

Then, in June, New York City Ballet revives “Brahms/Handel,� the ballet she choreographed with Jerome Robbins in 1984 for the company. Not seen since 1991, this cascading dual-torrent ballet — its cast is divided into two separate troupes, each led by a virtuoso ballerina resplendent — used to seem like the only masterpiece created for City Ballet since the death of Balanchine. Here’s hoping it will be as ebullient again.

More about the festival:

Quote

The 10th anniversary of Robbins’s death will prompt celebrations across the country and around the world: Robbins triple bills at San Francisco Ballet (March 8-19) and Pacific Northwest Ballet (May 29 to June 8); the Royal Ballet in London’s first revival of his “Dances at a Gathering� in more than 31 years; and, at New York City Ballet, a Robbins-based spring season featuring no fewer than 30 ballets, the largest-scale celebration anywhere of any single choreographer’s works other than City Ballet’s 1993 celebration of its founding maestro, George Balanchine.

        Is ABT doing something of Robbin's during this death anniversary?Maybe, they will do something in the fall of 2008?

[carbro]

Quote

Then, in June, New York City Ballet revives "Brahms/Handel,"� the ballet she choreographed with Jerome Robbins in 1984 for the company. Not seen since 1991, this cascading dual-torrent ballet "its cast is divided into two separate troupes, each led by a virtuoso ballerina resplendent" used to seem like the only masterpiece created for City Ballet since the death of Balanchine. Here's hoping it will be as ebullient again.

Yikes !  To invoke Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the standard of "masterpiece" seems to be defining [it] downward.

[Dale]

Two things:

The season listings page of the NY Times says Watermill will be revived for the festival.

And Ellen Bar's film on Opus Jazz has a website: http://www.opusjazz.com/  
I think it's wonderful that these dancers felt such a connection to a work from 1958 that it inspired such an enterprise.  This seems to dispell the myth, spread by some ADs, that dancers are only inspired by new works.