4 replies to this topic

[dirac]

An obituary for Alan M. Kriegsman by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times.

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Alan M. Kriegsman, the longtime dance critic for The Washington Post and the first dance critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 84.

The cause was heart disease, said his wife of 55 years, Sali Ann, a former dance director of the National Endowment of the Arts.

[dirac]

A preview of Houston Ballet's new program, "Women@Art" by Theodore Bale for CultureMap Houston.

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Also from Canada but now based in New York is Aszure Barton, who is likely putting the finishing touches on her world premiere for Houston Ballet as I write. She’s certainly established, having had her choreography performed by major companies such as National Ballet of Canada, The Martha Graham Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Netherlands Dance Theater, and many others. One of her biggest supporters has been none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov. It will be intriguing to see what sorts of artistic matters she is concerned with at present and how the company handles her challenging style.

[dirac]

A previewof the fall season in dance by Judith Mackrell in The Guardian.

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This archetypal Romantic ballet about the love between a water sprite and a doomed young nobleman has received a choreographic makeover from Northern Ballet director David Nixon. Set to the Hans Werne Henze score commissioned for Frederick Ashton's 1958 version, this has sets and costumes by the excellent Jerome Kaplan.

[dirac]

A review of the Mariinsky Ballet in 'Cinderella' by Gerald Dowler in The Financial Times.

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As far as ballets go, this one has precious little dancing, of the classical sort at least. The corps mug, flap and shimmy their way through tawdry little moves, light years away from their danse d’école, a reference point for ballet worldwide. Ratmansky has eschewed beauty of movement for caricature, the rarefied for the vernacular, and rides roughshod over the rhythms and pulses of this extraordinary score.

[dirac]

Sun Myung Moon, who founded the Universal Ballet along with a lot of other things, is dead at age 92.

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Mr. Moon’s organizations established connections with African-American religious leaders, and he made forays into culture and education, establishing a ballet company in South Korea and financing a ballet school in Washington. In 1992 an organization with ties to Mr. Moon rescued the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, from bankruptcy, pouring in $110 million in subsidies over a decade and taking effective control. Mr. Moon received an honorary degree.

The university’s administration denied that the church had influence, but critics of the arrangement contended that students were being lured into church training with the promise of scholarships, noted that the church had opened a boarding school on campus for members’ children, and said that the church had used the university to import money, in the form of tuition, as well as followers, in the form of the many foreign students who attended.