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[dirac]

The second part of a two-part article on Ballet Theatre of Maryland's plans for the new season.

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"We have 10 new apprentices and a new company male dancer named Will Smith who are excellent additions to the company," said Dianna Cuatto, the ballet's artistic director. "I have been working with the new apprentices for the past six weeks, and they are the most talented group I have ever had."

[dirac]

New Orleans Ballet Theatre performs next week. Story by Chris Waddington in The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

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For all that, however, this husband-and-wife creative team has saved its most jaw-dropping artistic feats for its offstage work with the New Orleans Ballet Theatre. Since 2002, the two have recruited some of the nation's best dancers for annual concerts, melding the stars of other troupes into a well-drilled ensemble for a few weeks a year.

Schramel and Hardwick have kicked it up a notch for this week's concerts in Baton Rouge (Wednesday at the Manship Theater) and New Orleans (Friday and Saturday at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts). The program includes a romping Balanchine classic, a funk-driven dance by choreographer Julia Adam and a revival of Schramel's "Patriotism, " a dark-themed 2010 piece based on a Yukio Mishima short story.

[dirac]

An article on Edgar Degas  in connection with the Royal Academy's forthcoming exhibition by Mark Hudson in The Telegraph.

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The only one of the group with private means, he was an avant-gardist who remained rigidly conservative in his social attitudes, who has gained a posthumous reputation as a misogynist, anti-Semite and snob; an artist obsessed with the old masters and the classical principles of drawing, who was in some ways hardly an Impressionist at all, yet who felt impelled to experiment out of a kind of congenital impatience with the way the world is.

Just below Montmartre is the area of affluent streets where Degas was born in 1834, and where – apart from a period painting in Italy as a youth and an extended stay with relatives in New Orleans – he spent his entire life.

[dirac]

Fourteen-year-old Bella Kowalski talks about attending SAB's summer session...and not being invited to stay on.

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"Because I'm only 14, I'm not that upset about it," she said. "I was competing against people who were there for the second time, which was definitely harder."

From the young dancer friends she made in New York she learned "Salut" -- sa-loo -- is French for "Hi" and that most must spend two summers studying ballet at SAB before getting asked to stay. A study of bios proved the point, said Bella: Dancers employed by the school's professional affiliate, New York City Ballet, seemed to go on for full time study, after a second summer.

[dirac]

Ballet West holds its 11th annual sneak preview of the new season, 'Curtain Up.'

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.....the focus of this year's "Curtain Up" will be on six original works-in-progress, choreographed by Ballet West dancers, which are competing to be on the season's "Innovations" program in May 2012.

[dirac]

A preview of Graeme Murphy's new 'Romeo and Juliet' for the Australian Ballet.

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In front of him was a skeletal blueprint. "I let the music tell me a story, and I listened to what that story was," Murphy says. "Out from that, all the steps had to grow, all the sets, all the costumes. It's like a foundation for a house. And then you invite all the designers, and the plumbers and all the electricians in, and the building begins."

This month Murphy unveils the result. Costing about $1.2 million to stage, his Romeo and Juliet is one of the most significant new works to be commissioned by the Australian Ballet in years, and certainly one of the most anticipated since Murphy's all-conquering Swan Lake in 2002.

[dirac]

Kate Moss' eight-year-old daughter will get her very own ballet studio.

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“Kate is really behind Lila’s ambition. She thinks she’s a really great dancer and needs all the support she can get, so that’s what’s she going to give her.

“She’s planning a special room with strip wooden floors, bars round the walls, huge gold-edged mirrored walls, and a grand piano.

“It will be the full works.”