Monday, April 19

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More on the fallout from the death of Liam Scarlett.

Alastair Macaulay for Slipped Disc.

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I’m assured by people who first knew choreographer Liam Scarlett in the last century that the details surrounding his death are known to very few. We should not assume, as many have done, that “Cancel culture” was the determining factor.

It’s also worth noting that, when a number of companies terminated their associations with Liam Scarlett in 2019-2020, not all followed suit In October 2020, he went to Munich to stage his “With a Chance of Rain” (2014) for the Bayerische Staatsballett. A British dancer there has written that his behaviour was nothing but professional, and that he impressed all as having learned from his errors and as happy to be given the chance to move on.

The Times

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Ballet companies have paid tribute to Liam Scarlett, the young British choreographer whose meteoric rise through the dance world was brought to an abrupt halt by allegations of sexual misconduct.

Debra Craine for The Times.

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Liam Scarlett, who died on Friday at the age of 35, left a legacy of select ballets that showed his early promise as a choreographer. Having trained at the Royal Ballet School and danced with the Royal Ballet, Scarlett was steeped in a love of the classical language at a time when many choreographers had turned their backs on the vocabulary of the 19th-century canon.

Obituary by David Jays in The Guardian.

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Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, Liam was the son of Laurence, a landscape gardener, and Deborah (nee Knipe), to whom he credited his love of music. He first took dance classes at four, and an early nativity play, he recalled, revealed a knack for “arranging people on stage nicely”. The Linda Shipton School of Dancing led, at 11, to the Royal Ballet school, where his choreography won several prizes.

 

 

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A story on dancers who started families during lockdown conditions.

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Then in March 2020, Ballet Hispanico stopped all in-person operations when New York City entered its COVID-19 lockdown. Verdecia and her husband—Ballet Hispanico dancer Lyvan Verdecia—were laid off along with the rest of the company’s dancers. It was a full-blown crisis—with one unexpected upside. Their schedules were wide open. 

“Although financially it wasn’t as optimal, we had the time,” Melissa Verdecia recalls. “One day I said, “Lyvan, maybe this is the time.” Nine months later their son Liam was born, a month earlier than expected.

 

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A story on Gavin Larsen's new book by Grant Butler in The Oregonian.

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Those essays have been pulled together in “Being A Ballerina” (University Press of Florida; 256 pages, $26.95), a lush memoir that spans Larsen’s 18-year career, including her time at OBT. It’s a vivid insider’s perspective on the rigors of professional ballet, as well as what a dancer’s life is like beyond the footlights.

 

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An interview with Kathryn Morgan.

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It’s when she got back into the dance world seven years later that she realized a huge problem in the industry had not gone away.

“You still have to be exceedingly small," Morgan said. "You still have to fit that mold and the standard is so extreme and I just didn’t fit that.”

 

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A review of Polish National Ballet by Jenifer Sarver for Bachtrack.

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Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet is a bit like a plate of lovely raw oysters: delectable for some, unpalatable for others. Prokofiev's score is reordered, the choreography is contemporary, characters are missing, and each of the three main scenes is set during a different 20th-century time period, thus removing the essential timeframe which adds to the desperation of the two teenagers. Yet, this work is also a truly original and engagingly fresh take on the classic ballet, the historical timeline a macrocosmic metaphor for the universality of passion and plight; the choreography is creative and extremely musical, reflecting intricacies in the difficult score, and the utilization of period films folding gently into sets is a very skillful blending of film and 3D. It gives far more scope to the secondary characters and the corps de ballet than other versions, solving a traditional problem with most productions of this work. Indeed, the choreography for the corps de ballet and secondary characters is often more interesting than that for the central couple. This works, as the Polish National Ballet is in excellent shape, showing a fantastic level of artistic and technical depth from all dancers.

 

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A review of Ballet West by Marianne Adams for danceviewtimes.

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This was just a tasting though, and the performance really hit its stride with the next work. “Aria,” by Val Caniparoli, was a deeply captivating, ruminative male solo and easily the highlight of the program.  The 1997 work had its company premiere a few days earlier, and at this performance, featuring Jordan Veit, it felt like a pantomime, but somehow for the entire body.  Despite his face being concealed most of the time by a full-face mask, Veit’s body went through all the modulations of emotion embedded in the choreography, with earthy spinal bends, and jumps effortlessly exploding out of pliés and floating upward to the live performance of George Friedrich Handel’s Overture from “Rinaldo”, lovely live singing by mezzo-soprano Aubrey Adams-McMillan of “Almirena’s Aria” from “Rinaldo,” and sometimes to silence.  In other moments Veit would take the mask off, holding it or dropping it to the floor, filling the moment with rarified plasticity that would interact with the mask and the space with nuanced movement and sentiment.