7 replies to this topic

[dirac]

Oregon Ballet Theatre appoints Anne Mueller as interim artistic director.

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"During her tenure at OBT, Mueller emerged as one of the company's most reliable artists, capable of dancing lyrical classics as well as challenging modern works," The Oregonian's Grant Butler wrote when Mueller retired from performing in April 2011, after 15 years with the company.

She stayed on as artistic coordinator. Following the departure of executive director Diane Syrcle this summer, a management restructuring called for Mueller's role to expand.

[dirac]

Highlights of the year in dance by Jordan Levin in The Miami Herald.

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The ouster of storied Miami City Ballet artistic director Edward Villella, founder of South Florida’s most important dance institution, was the end of an era for the troupe Villella had built into one of the nation’s best. The controversy also marked the ascendance of powerful donors who pressured him to leave — a lesson, perhaps, for other cultural organizations. MCB’s future is now in the hands of his promising but still unproven successor, Lourdes Lopez.

Read more here: http://www.miamihera...l#storylink=cpy

[dirac]

A dance student with Down syndrome performs in Colorado Ballet's Nutcracker.

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Tuesday night’s performance included special guest Eliza Richard from the “Be Beautiful Be Yourself” dance class for children with Down syndrome. The 10-year-old dancer appeared in the party scene near the beginning of the show. The class is a partnership between the Colorado Ballet, the Global Down Syndrome Foundation and the Anna and John J. Sie Center.

[dirac]

Photo gallery of Pamela Hayes Classical Ballet Theatre's Nutcracker.

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She also likes to keep the classic Tchaikovsky ballet funny, infusing the fantasy with frolicsome bits of stage business and comic choreography that distinguishes it from other "Nutcrackers," as does the company's casting choice of a more mature Clara.

[dirac]

A review of Miami City Ballet's Nutcracker by Clara LaVelle for the Miami New Times.

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The show started out slow, which is less the fault of MCB and more a function of story set-up. It's fun to watch children in pinafores prance excitedly around a Christmas tree, but when you know the trippy scenes that are yet to follow, you're naturally going to want to skip ahead to the rats and toy soldiers and marzipan dancers.

And when MCB's production enters that world, the payoff is astounding -- a thinly veiled on-stage scenery change that takes place right under the audience's nose, eliciting gasps of delight from nearly everyone in the theater. And then it's snowing, and beautiful snowflake ballerinas are dancing, and oh, Christmas.

[dirac]

A review of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo by Tobi Tobias in her blog, "Seeing Things."

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Laurencia, in its unTrocked version, is a ballet based on a seventeenth-century melodramatic play by Lope de Vega that was inspired by a real-life historical event. The ballet was created in 1939 by Vakhtang Chabukiani—a formidable male virtuoso who defined the “heroic” style. No one ever kicked sand in this fellow’s face! The eponymous heroine of the piece is the feistiest girl you’d ever want to meet. No droit de seigneur customs prevail for her. There are still companies playing the piece straight, the Mikhailovsky, for one.

[dirac]

A review of Texas Ballet Theater's "The Nutty Nutcracker" by Mark Lowry in The Star-Telegram.

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A bike-riding, Spandex-wearing Lance Armstrong is promptly stripped of his medals, which are given to the American women's gymnastics team.


Drosselmeyer is Abe Lincoln (Paul Adams), the first toy who comes to life is Carly Rae Jepsen, breaking out into Call Me Maybe, and the second toys are John Travolta and Olivia Newton John as Danny and Sandy from Grease (Alexander and Heather Kotelenets).

[dirac]

A review of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo by Claudia La Rocco in The New York Times.

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Yet this all-male company can now seem musty itself, particularly in its handling of gender. On the eve of 2013, the Trocks’ delight in, and reliance on, campy drag speaks as much — if not more — to a wider history of cultural expectations and stereotypes as it does to ballet-specific ones.