11 replies to this topic

[dirac]

Winnipeg presents Twyla Tharpwith the key to the city.

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Wh
Mayor Sam Katz made the presentation Friday morning, calling Tharp "prolific and a visionary."

Tharp, an international dance icon, has been in Winnipeg for the past six weeks, working on the Canadian premiere of her latest production, the Princess and the Goblin at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

[dirac]

A review of the Joffrey Balletby Sid Smith in The Chicago Tribune.

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Back in 1967, programming Kurt Jooss' anti-war "The Green Table" at the height of America's own anti-war fever was a mark of Robert Joffrey's astute timing. But it was also a highly personal move: Joffrey had first encountered it as an audience member himself at age 11. One of the troupe's great strengths is its flair for reviving gems, while another is its affinity for encouraging contemporary choreographers. It's the latter spirit that brings us Jiri Kylian's "Forgotten Land," which the Joffrey acquired in 1985, and James Kudelka's "Pretty BALLET," premiered two years ago and one of the troupe's most distinguished commissions under current artistic director Ashley Wheater.

[dirac]

A review of Milwaukee Ballet in "La Boheme" by Tom Strini for Third Coast Digest.

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They also defined this ballet immediately as a dance piece and not as a mime show. Pink has a way of winding information into his dances and rarely stops the dancing to move the plot along in gesture only. Pink’s ballet brims over with dancing, among the characters in private, at parties and in the streets of Paris. In the Cafe Momus scene, for example, a bounding Barry Molina, as a Father Christmas sort of toy vendor, bounds about on springy legs. A troop of children line up behind and imitate him. Of course it’s all choreographed, but in the whirling crowd it feels wonderfully spontaneous.

[dirac]

Georgia Ballet kicks off its season this weekend.

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Besides public performances, the company will give four performances — two on Thursday and two today — for about 2,400 school children.

“‘The Firebird’ is a perfect repertoire choice for students, with a clearly told story that presents a moral lesson involving bravery, good choices, love, reconciliation and respect,” Ziemann-DeVos said.

[dirac]

Chan Hon Gohwrites  about teaching dancers to look beyond the steps.

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Upon hearing this unexpected assessment of abilities, I felt ill. But what can I do? Well, in my rage to rebel and prove otherwise, I first cut my hair really short as if to say, “I didn’t care and I don’t need long hair anyways because I’m not doing Giselle”. Then I asked myself, “How would I tell a story through steps and emotions, through phrasings of the music and the subtleties of reactions, but without a single word?”

I was 26 years old and already a principal dancer of the largest classical ballet company in Canada. So I guess one could say I was a good dancer, but this was my turning point. I want to be an artist.

[dirac]

A review of the Royal Balletin "Swan Lake" by Louise Levene in The Telegraph.

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Dowell’s production is choreographically kosher but is blighted by busy New Romantic designs that already looked dated when they premiered in 1987 and by a staging that seems to grow in fussiness and vulgarity with each revival.


Visually, there isn’t much that two-dozen crisp white tutus and a reliable skip hire firm couldn’t fix, but it would take some serious horse tranquillisers to put the character-playing to rights. In the opening scene only Elizabeth McGorian’s imperious Queen Mother and Thiago Soares’s dolefully dignified Siegfried show any sense of decorum – of “who bows to whom” as Frederick Ashton once put it.

[dirac]

Michel Legrand says he's working on his first ballet.

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Legrand has composed more than two hundred film and television scores and several musicals and has made well over a hundred albums. He is currently working on the symphonic pieces ordered by Vladimir Spivakov and Philadelphia Orchestra.

“I don’t feel my age. That’s no obstacle for me,” he said.

[dirac]

Virginia Johnson writes on the subject of black dancers and ballet in The Huffington Post.

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Once again a different perspective on the art form will enliven the field, but the absence of role models is not the only reason ballet remains so pale. The high cost of training for a career in ballet (though let us not assume that there are no African Americans of means who can afford to do so) and a literal old guard who prized a cookie-cutter similarity in the dancers they put on their stages stood in the way of diversifying the art form are certainly factors, but there are also systemic aesthetic and political issues that contribute to the exclusion blacks from ballet.

[dirac]

A review of Ballet Des Moines by Michael Morain in The Des Moines Register.

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Call it whatever you’d like, actually, but go see it for yourself. It’s one of many elegant surprises in “Prelude: A Triple Bill,” which Ballet Des Moines presents this weekend at Hoyt Sherman Place. Some things to keep in mind:


First, these are professional dancers. The company casts hordes of students every year for “The Nutcracker,” but all but a few of this weekend’s roles belong to dancers in their 20s and 30s who recently moved to town for full-time, 26-week contracts, a company first.

[dirac]

Sarasota Ballet hosts the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

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Over more than five decades, Taylor has gained iconic status in the modern dance world, heading one of the few contemporary troupes to survive and thrive through the arts recession. Sarasota Ballet Artistic Director Iain Webb says he was "desperate" to get a Paul Taylor ballet into the company's repertoire simply because of his stature.

[dirac]

Robert Everett-Green muses on the persistence of fairy-tale ballets.

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The market explanation is the simplest: Storybook ballets sell, so make more of them. But sylphs and fairies have a deeper hold on the art. They were present at the birth of a key part of ballet’s movement vocabulary. They were the reason dancers cultivated the illusion of weightlessness that culminated in the pointe shoe. Marie Taglioni dancing on point in La Sylphide was the 1830s version of state-of-the-art visual fantasy, and it changed ballet permanently.

[dirac]

A review of Lines Balletby Janice Berman for San Francisco Classical Voice.

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Alonzo King, having been anointed a brilliantly breakaway classical choreographer by a prominent dance critic, is in the process of displaying just about everything he can do — in one show. Or maybe everything else he can do, since his new evening-length work, Constellation, takes his Lines Dance Company ballerinas off-pointe and away from the naturalistic environment of last year’s stunning Resin.