9 replies to this topic

[dirac]

A preview of the local season in dance by Nicole English in The Kansas City Star.

Quote

The recent grand opening of the Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity foretells what is likely to be a very memorable season of dance for the Kansas City Ballet.

The ballet will present the world premiere of “Tom Sawyer” Oct. 14-23 at the Kauffman Center. This American coming-of-age story was choreographed by artistic director William Whitener, with an original score by Tony Award-winning composer Maury Yeston.

[dirac]

Ballet Midwest holds auditions for its Nutcracker.

Quote

Ballet Midwest will conduct auditions Saturday for community dancers wanting to join the troupe for its annual production of "The Nutcracker."

The city's oldest and largest production of the holiday classic will be staged Dec. 9-11 at the Topeka Performing Arts Center.

[dirac]

Boston Ballet will give a performance free of charge on the Esplanade for the first time.

Quote

As for the packed two-hour program, which will start at 7 p.m., it will include the Spanish and Arabian divertissements and the pas de deux for Sugar Plum and her Cavalier from “The Nutcracker,’’ the pas de deux for Siegfried and Odette from “Swan Lake,’’ and the Rose Adagio from “Sleeping Beauty.’’

At a recent rehearsal for the “Nutcracker’’ pas de deux, McPhee and company assistant artistic director Russell Kaiser work on the logistics of getting Whitney Jensen and John Lam on and off stage as well as the niceties of the couple’s fish dive. Jensen’s black rehearsal top and tutu make her look like a Black Swan Sugar Plum, or maybe the Licorice Fairy. If she wore the outfit onstage, it could draw the goth crowd.

[dirac]

An Associated Press story on Rahm Emanuel's plans for dance in Chicago.

Quote

"What's going to bring attention is the talent and skill of the dancers," Emanuel said. "The only thing I have to contribute is that it's not just another art form for me, given my background."

In June, Emanuel spoke to the conference of the national organization for professional dance, Dance/USA, in Chicago. He told the attendees that Chicago "will be the heartbeat of dance for the entire country."

[dirac]

A preview of Scottish Ballet at the Edinburgh Festival by Gareth K Vile in The Skinny, with quotes from Jorma Elo.

Quote

"It was mostly the music," he says. "I'd be listening to the violin concertos by well-known composers, and wanted to see what polarity and excitement dance would add to them." After he selected Mozart, he added "Steve Reich's Double Sextet - an interesting mix of different worlds." Reich is a minimalist master, percussive and driving, while Mozart is the baroque wunderkind. The composers do share a fascination with repetition, even where Reich shaves away the ornamentation that makes Mozart so popular.

For Scottish Ballet, this bill is characteristic. A familiar slice of neo-classical repertoire, and a more recent work from an international choreographer. As the national company, Scottish Ballet strives to satisfy both the traditionalists and the upstarts, bridging the gap between two very different audiences.

[dirac]

Carlos Acosta will be honored in Cuba next week.

Quote

The gala to honour Acosta at Garcia Lorca auditorium of Havana's Grand Theatre will be led by choreographer Alberto Mendez with the performance of dancers from the Contemporary Dance Company and the group lead by Santiago Alfonso, and other famous dancers.

[dirac]

"Nijinsky Siam" comes to Thailand.

Quote

With help from French scholars Sylvie Dancre and Philippe de Lustrac, Pichet Klunchun, the most frequently travelling contemporary Thai artist, has been able to collect more than 20 photographs. With the use of Thai shadow puppetry, Pichet has created Nijinsky Siam, which had its world premiere last May at the Victoria Theatre as part of the Singapore Arts Festival 2010.

The show was well received by both the audiences and international media and later on it was invited to many international festivals in Europe, including performances in Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey and Britain.

[dirac]

A feature on blind ballet students in Brazil.

Quote

Learning is slow and arduous, requiring much patience from ballerina Fernanda Bianchini, 32, who is trying to convey the beauty of the discipline to the students, who have one major difficulty: they are blind.

“The hardest thing is to teach the movement of the arms,” Bianchini says, saying that some have never seen these motions. It is easier to show the position of the legs, by focusing on the natural stiffness of the lower appendages, she adds.

[dirac]

Reviews of the Chicago Dancing Festival.

The Chicago Tribune

Quote

But founders Lar Lubovitch and Jay Franke also managed some interesting themes, including a mini-tribute to Martha Graham. Through the 1970s, Graham was eminence grise, overshadowed a tad in the following decades of post-modernism.

But Thursday's impassioned Auditorium Theatre performance of her "Embattled Garden," set in Eden, by members of the Graham troupe, proved as exciting as any fest offering. It's as if this 1958 piece has enjoyed breathing room and can be viewed with the reverence heaped on other midcentury arts, a heavily stylized ritual with colors as bold as Mondrian's and tension as gnarled and febrile as Jackson Pollock's. The set, a fascinating modernist design by the late Isamu Noguchi, is one of the stars.

Chicago Magazine

Quote

There is a tendency—in arts criticism and in the world at large—toward taxonomy. We simply can’t resist classifying damn near everything we see down to its genus and species. Of all the arts, dance, I think, struggles the most stiffly under labels, and quite frankly, it’s a huge turnoff when movement is described as modern, postmodern, contemporary, or whatever blah-de-blah is the term of the day.

[dirac]

The Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity opens.

Quote

As hundreds of artists, arts administrators and representatives from local and state governments gathered under a tent Friday morning near the new $32 million Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity, a succession of trains threatened to drown out the grand opening ceremonies.