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[dirac]

Nikolaj Hubbe is named as a judge on a Danish reality show dance competition.

TV2’s entertainment program director Gitte Madsen, for her part, was not worried that Hübbe’s cocaine scandal would hurt ‘Vild med dans’. “I don’t have any comments on an internal study about a workplace that I don’t know,” she added for the television news site TVTID.dk. “The morning papers wrote that the cocaine scandal lasted all summer. But as far as I know, [it] was only in the media for a single day in July.”

In fact, the scandal occupied Jyllands-Posten, Politiken, Information, Berlingske and The Copenhagen Post for the better part of a week in July and even pulled politicians and the culture minister into the fray. Four dancers from the Royal Ballet avowed – once again, anonymously – in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that the accusations in the report were true and that the Royal Theatre’s management had dismissed their complaints.

[dirac]

New York City Ballet tries to placate angry Fourth Ring Society subscribers.

Under the new arrangement, the ballet said, Society NYCB members will be able to buy two tickets per performance, excluding “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.” Some performances of other ballets will be blacked out. For most performances at least 70 such tickets will available, which could be for seats in any section of the theater. The program will not be open to new memberships, though that may change in the future.

[dirac]

Reviews of the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet in 'Anna Karenina.'

The Guardian

But if we have a clear sense of how trapped Anna is by people and by place, what's less present is the inner world she inhabits. And it's here that Shchedrin's score is such a problem for Ratmansky. Its hurtling pace allows few moments for the characters to take emotional breath – we get only a cursory snapshot of the moment when Anna and Vronsky fall in love. And while their first bedroom duet is eloquently choreographed, its sheering lines suggesting both ecstasy and doom, the abrasively martial music that accompanies it prevents the emotion from resonating – despite a performance of dark intensity from Diana Vishneva.

The Financial Times

What Ratmansky’s two acts offer is a spectre’s view of the tragedy, a drama played by unquiet ghosts, narrative as illusion and allusion. I found the work fascinating, confusing, a tale told through hints and fragments of behaviour, and ultimately unsatisfactory, albeit unsatisfactory on those terms that we associate most strongly with Kenneth MacMillan’s dramatic procedures and his searching and boldly voiced language.

The Telegraph

Nobody could accuse the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky of lacking ambition. Not only does he decide to make Tolstoy’s gargantuan Anna Karenina into a ballet – he does so while opting to wear a straitjacket.

Both arms are firmly tied behind his back by his chosen score, one written in 1972 by Rodion Shchedrin for a ballet of the same name. It surges along, full of generalised melancholy, and vaguely modernist discords, firmly underlining each moment of emotion....

[dirac]

Another reviewof the company, by Judith Flanders for The Arts Desk.

Indeed, the horse race was my favourite part of the evening. Ratmansky has tied himself to composer Rodion Shchedrin’s 1972 Anna Karenina score, created for his wife, Maya Plisetskaya, and the score sounds pretty much like the way the Bolshoi were dancing in the 1970s – a score for a silent movie, the urgent accompaniment to waving capes, rolling eyes, everyone making sure at every moment that every emotion is carried to the farthest balcony. While Ratmansky’s taste is far too refined and elegant for that, the music is a constraint, constantly driving him forward even as one senses he really would like to linger, to explore, to explain.

[dirac]

A review of Colorado Ballet by Kyle MacMillan in The Denver Post.

Emery LeCrone, 24, was by far the least well known of the of five featured choreographers, but she measured up well against her counterparts, with the Colorado Ballet previewing three movements of a new work, titled "Archetypes."

Like many of today's choreographers, LeCrone is trying to bring a new, contemporary look to ballet, but she is doing it not by trying to subvert the form or overlaying it with gimmicks. Instead, she has developed a fresh, clean style that maintains the essence of the centuries-old form but strips away some of its accumulated ornamentation and formality.