11 replies to this topic

[dirac]

A preview of Grand Rapids Ballet Company's "Sleeping Beauty" by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk in The Grand Rapids Press.

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“Sleeping Beauty” will be a collaboration between GRBC’s professional company under artistic director Patricia Barker, and its Junior Company, which debuted last season, led by Attila Mosolygo.

In part, that’s because “Sleeping Beauty” requires a very big cast. There’s an average of 100 roles per evening,” Barker said. “So it’s bigger than ‘Nutcracker."

[dirac]

The Classical Ballet of Guangzhou will perform in Long Beach.

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The Classical Ballet of Guangzhou, China, will be performing at the Terrace Theater on October 27th and 28th. Their Saturday matinee program will include excerpts from Sleeping Beauty and Paquita, as well as contemporary Chinese works including Natural Melody, and the symphonic ballet, The Phoenix. Evening performances on Saturday and Sunday will feature Cinderella, with original choreography and musical arrangements by Long Beach Ballet Artistic Director David Wilcox.

In 1997, Wilcox was invited to take his company to Taiwan to tour for three weeks with their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was such a success that they were invited back for a five week tour in 1998.

[dirac]

Four Australian arts organizations will present "Cinderella" in the next year. A look at the different versions of the story by Lindy Hume of Opera Queensland for The Australian.

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The different vernaculars around the new ballets for next year show two different faces of the story again.

Queensland Ballet artistic director Li Cunxin has been a fan of Texan Ben Stevenson's production since he performed in it at Houston Ballet, describing it as "charming, humorous, traditional and beautiful". His creation seems firmly in the Perrault camp of romantic dream fulfilment.

[dirac]

A review of Carolina Ballet's "A Balanchine Celebration" by Denise Cerniglia for Triangle Arts & Entertainment.

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The last piece, Who Cares? , is a whimsical ballet of fifteen short dances set to well-known George Gershwin tunes. Margaret Severin-Hansen and Gabor Kapin were masters of subtlety in the tender pas de deux The Man I Love, an intimate conversation between lovers. In Embraceable You Lilyan Vigo was exquisite, joining Kapin for an elegant uptown pas de deux. Jan Burkhard was full of youthful enthusiasm, exploding from the floor in the solo I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise. The company came together for the finale, I Got Rhythm. Super-fast turns and jumps exposed flashes of pink from the bottom layers of the dancers’ skirts designed by Steven Ruben.

[dirac]

Columbia City Ballet revives "Dracula: Ballet with a Bite."

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The idea to create a Dracula ballet came from Savannah. “It was the idea of Penny Stephenson, the founding director of Ballet South, which is based in Savannah,” Starrett says.“She approached me in the early ’90s. She wanted to do a Dracula ballet and wanted to know if I knew of one.”

At the time, there were only a few Dracula-based ballets in existence. Starrett’s board of directors wanted him to branch out more, and a Dracula ballet certainly fit the bill. “I’m more of a classicist, but I got more courageous,” he says.

[dirac]

Q&A with Timothy Coleman, Christina Chan, and Tan Fangxi, all of whom are making new pieces for Singapore Dance Theatre.

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What do you love most about dance?
[Coleman:] What I love most about dance is that when you perform in front of an audience you are able to take them on a journey, be it a ballet with a story or an abstract contemporary ballet. There are no words involved to be misinterpreted, thus the relationship between the dancer and the audience is a lot more direct. Communicating with our bodies is a much more basic method of getting an idea across but at the same can communicate such specific and complicated feelings.

[dirac]

An interview with Keenan Kampa.

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As a new member of the corps, she intends to keep the mighty work ethic she has become known for — even in Russia. As the first American dancer in the company, she does not want to step on toes. But she has her aspirations.

“Like any dancer, I want to move up the ranks and become a world-class dancer and an artist,” she said. What remains unsaid is whether the foreigner-averse Mariinsky, already breaking new ground by hiring Kampa, would ever cultivate an American all the way up to first soloist or principal dancer.

[dirac]

The dance writer Leland Windreichhas died at age 85.

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Lee, motivated to record their glory, obtained a $2,000 grant from the Canada Council and, with this small amount and some diligent research, he frugally crisscrossed the continent finding and interviewing them. His book June Roper: Ballet Starmaker was published in 1999.

Funny and knowledgeable, Lee also wrote numerous articles over six decades. He edited Dancing for de Basil: Letters to her Parents from Rosemary Deveson.

[dirac]

A review of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet by Clement Crisp in the Financial Times.

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Dance companies can sometimes identify themselves with a merry inexactitude – The Grand State Ballet of Bogustan may not be exactly what an eager public expects. Cedar Lake calls itself Contemporary Ballet, and you could have fooled me. Contemporary ballet suggests creativity and dancing in that classic manner we gratefully see in stagings by Alexey Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon. Cedar Lake proposed three oddly titled works – Violet Kid by Hofesh Shechter, Tuplet by Alexander Ekman, and Grace Engine by Crystal Pite – whose balletic credentials were invisible in a sameness of ferocious energy, spirit-numbing racket, portentous programme notes and a monumentally tiresome air of doom and vehement self-justification. Of balletic form, physical clarity, nary a trace.

[dirac]

Q&A with Michael Pink.

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OnMilwaukee.com: What do you think are the most dramatic changes you've made in the company? When you started it was known for being a very top-heavy organization, with lots of principal dancers and soloists and so forth.
Michael Pink: Yeah, I don't subscribe to the class structure; I mean especially an organization where there's so few dancers – if you have 25, 24 dancers, they're all going to have to work equally well and what you want is a diverse team of people and their strengths. I would love all my artists to be just artists. And I changed the whole structure from being principals and soloists and corps – which are just antiquated categories – to just "artist" and "leading artist."

[dirac]

A studyin the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that it may be possible to predict certain kinds of dance injuries from abnormalities detected in ultrasounds.

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To investigate further, the researchers recruited 79 professional ballet dancers (35 men; 44 women) working for the English National Ballet, none of whom had symptoms of tendinopathy. The dancers underwent detailed ultrasonographic imaging of both tendons and were then followed up for 24 months for incident tendon injury.

Whilst sonographic tendon abnormalities were common among the dancers, only moderate or severe focal hypoechoic changes were mildly but significantly predictive of disabling achilles or patellar tendon injury, which occurred in 10 dancers (14 tendons - seven achilles, seven patellar) over the follow-up period.

[dirac]

An interview with Olga Smirnova by Jim Smith in The New York Times' blog.

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You might think the speed of her ascent would leave Smirnova slightly breathless and giddy, but of course ballerinas are nothing if not poised. Instead, she offers a muted expressiveness that’s like watching water ripple over the face of a pond, and an almost spooky responsiveness. Though she speaks very little English, she reacted to my questions before they were translated, in some cases before I’d finished, and once or twice before I was sure what I was going to ask. Above all she is focused, and takes nothing for granted: “I wasn’t prepared to make the move to Moscow; it was very unexpected,” she said. “As a matter of fact I was preparing myself for something much worse, getting used the idea that bad things might happen to you. It’s been quite the opposite.”