Karen Kain

[carbro]

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has a page dedicated to Ms. Kain. Included is a timeline of tv and radio broadcasts tracing her career from a budding ballerina through her appointment as Artistic Director of the National Ballet.

[volcanohunter]

Thanks for that link. It would really be nice if the CBC released some of Kain's televised performances that have never been available commercially, such as Ashton's La Fille mal gardée and Glen Tetley's Alice and La Ronde.

[Helene]

I loved Alice when NBoC brought it to NYC on tour. I, too, hope CBC will release her televised broadcasts in her honor.

[dirac]

A nice interview with Kain here. I liked her comments on Nureyev.

When you took the helm of the company 10 years ago, what did you want to accomplish as artistic leader? What do you think are your most notable achievements during these years?

After being with the National Ballet for so many years, I had three very straightforward goals. I thought that the company needed to raise its level of dancing and to have a more varied repertory; and we needed to be part of the world conversation as a ballet company. The latter could be only achieved if we had better dancers and a more diverse repertory, including more original works......

When a ballet company is run by a choreographer, it’s very normal that the point of view of the company becomes the point of view of that choreographer. In the past, we were very much focused on the works of James Kudelka; we had a large number of his ballets, which we still perform frequently. I thought we needed to diversify the repertoire a lot more. I wanted to work with other choreographers of our time. That’s why I started reaching out to Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky. I knew that they could take the company to the next level.