5 replies to this topic

[dirac]

A story on Carlos Acosta's plans to restore an abandoned ballet school in Cuba.

Quote

It is not clear who will foot the large bill for widening and dredging the river that skirts the school, and floods on a regular basis.

But the cost of all other restoration work is estimated at around £6m ($9.5m). The idea is to move in stages and raise funds along the way: so far, £200,000 has been pledged in donations from abroad.

[dirac]

A review of Diablo Ballet by Ann Murphy in The San Jose Mercury News.

Quote

Friday night at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek that question hounded Diablo Ballet's opening program of its 2012-13 season. In an evening filled with talented and passionate dancers, the company mounted work that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Dance has endured, but the issues of legacy and revitalization haven't gone away.

The production of "The Moor's Pavane" threw the problem into sharp relief.....

[dirac]

A review of Ballet Frontier of Texas' Nutcracker by Punch Shaw in The Star-Telegram.

Quote

The second act featured choreography by the late Roy Tobias, one of Tseng's teachers. His moves were more traditional, but not jarringly different from the overall personality of the first act.

The dancing was a mixed bag. The cast is made up of a trio of pros from Texas Ballet Theater (Paul Adams, Lainey Schilling Logan and Angela Kenny) supported by the mostly young dancers of Frontier, a company that places an emphasis on training new talent. So the visitors, and the more experienced members of Frontier's troupe, were quite able. But the training wheels were often apparent on the rest of the cast. There was one pretty good collision in the first act, for example.

Read more here: http://www.star-tele...l#storylink=cpy

[dirac]

Q&A with Peter Anastos.

Quote

What impact did Les Ballets Trockadero have?
It brought thousands of people to ballet performances and created a huge audience to see more. Once people saw the Trocks, they were no longer fearful of ballet as something they couldn’t understand. Laughter is great medicine! We inoculated people against any prejudice about ballet. The other impact was on the inside of the dance world — we loosened a lot of people up. We helped take ballet out of the temple and into popular culture.

[dirac]

A review of the Royal New Zealand Ballet in 'Giselle' by John Daly-Peoples in The National Business Review.

Quote

Gillian Murphy gave a staggering performance as doomed young woman, providing an enchanting and intelligent display and conveying a real sense of character through gesture, dance and acting.

[dirac]

A review of Dance Theatre of Harlem by Michael Upchurch in The Seattle Times. (Thanks to sandik for the link!)

Quote

There's little to say about "Gloria," a prettily patterned and vaguely "spiritual" ballet set to music by Poulenc. So let's move straight to "Far But Close," which had its world premiere on Friday.

Its four performers — Da'Von Doane, Jehbreal Jackson, Ashley Murphy and Stephanie Williams — move in time to an amplified chamber score by Daniel Bernard Roumain that alternates with a rhyming narrative by Daniel Beaty about a man on the subway, trying to pick up a "pretty little black girl, sitting there, looking so tough." (Her first reaction: reaching for her mace.)