5 replies to this topic

[dirac]

New York City Ballet finds a cheap method of furnishing its theater's promenade.

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In exchange for featuring the work of three young design firms, it is receiving the free use of their furniture for the season.

[dirac]

Christopher Hampson shares his plans for Scottish Ballet.

The Stage

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Scottish Ballet’s new artistic director Christpher Hampson has announced a new version of Hansel and Gretel and the first ever production of a full-length Matthew Bourne ballet outside the choreographer’s own company New Adventures.
In his first announcement since taking up the post in August, Hampson outlined his vision for the future of Scottish Ballet. As well as his own choreography, he aims to broaden its repertoire and produce new work in original ways.

BBC News

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In the long-term, Mr Hampson says he hoped to re-establish SB2, the company's smaller touring wing, and bring back works by Peter Darrell and Kenneth MacMillan.

[dirac]

Natalia Makarova is among this year's Kennedy Center honorees.

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Like that of Yo-Yo Ma in 2011, Ms. Makarova’s selection highlights a foreign-born artist with past ties to the center. She left the Kirov Ballet in the Soviet Union to join the American Ballet Theater and performed in “Romeo and Juliet” the week the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. Now 71, she said receiving the award was a “remarkable twist of fate.”

[dirac]

A preview of New York City Ballet'sBalanchine-Stravinsky programs by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times.

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When Stravinsky saw the new pure-dance work that Balanchine set to his “Movements for Piano and Orchestra” in 1963, he said that the ballet had helped him understand his own music better: he had designed the floor plan but Balanchine had built the building. “Movements” makes drama out of man versus woman, male-female couple against all-female group, symmetry versus asymmetry. The orthodoxy of ballet language is interspersed with forms and figures so novel that they seem anticlassical. You follow it on many levels at once — rhythm, spatial architecture, gender, body language — and, like Stravinsky himself, hear the music better in consequence.

[dirac]

A radio interview with Emil DeCou.

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Human imagination as the source of scientific innovation is the idea behind an upcoming concert by the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra in Seattle. Diverting from its usual mission of tracking orbiting ballerinas, the PNB musicians on this occasion will provide ground support for space shuttle astronauts, NASA flight controllers and such stellar names as Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura from "Star Trek."

[dirac]

A piece on Paul Taylor by Marina Harss in The Nation.

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Taylor’s teachers included Graham, José Limón and Antony Tudor. In 1959, George Balanchine, arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the last century, created a solo for him in Episodes, for which he famously asked Taylor to move “like fly in glass of milk.” He also offered Taylor a place in his company, New York City Ballet, an invitation the dancer never considered. (For all ballet’s late-twentieth-century rapprochement with modern dance, it is highly unlikely that such an offer would be made today.) To the headstrong Taylor, ballet had no appeal: it was a creaky pile of “froufrou” and “stiff-necked pretensions” that relied on a finicky technique and groomed a dancer to look “decorative, like a hollow person.” Modern dance, in contrast, held out the promise of momentum, weighted gesture and some deeper form of relevance.