dirac Posted May 30, 2021 Share Posted May 30, 2021 Q&A with Sarah Lane. Quote What were the circumstances that led you to leave ABT? After the 2019 season ended, for the first time in my career I asked Kevin very respectfully to not pair me with one particular partner ever again. He was consistently injured and calling out of rehearsals, and never in class. It made it hard for me to perform my best. Soon afterwards, my casting changed—I only had three shows for the following Met season. Kevin had been happy with my performances initially, but shortly after I made this request he backtracked and said that my partner gave an amazing show and I didn't. I felt disposable, like as a woman I had no voice. But I knew in my heart that I had done the best season that I could do. Link to comment
dirac Posted May 30, 2021 Author Share Posted May 30, 2021 Victoria Morgan announces her retirement. Quote The longtime artistic director of the Cincinnati Ballet announced Wednesday she is retiring at the end of the 2021-2022 season. Victoria Morgan has led the Cincinnati Ballet for 25 years. Related. Quote During her 25-year tenure, Morgan has been more than artistic director. For a time, she also served as artistic director and CEO, a period the ballet credits her for helping to stabilize the company's finances after years of deficits. She was also "instrumental" in the effort to secure funding for the ballet's new facility, scheduled to open this June. Link to comment
dirac Posted May 30, 2021 Author Share Posted May 30, 2021 Carla Fracci dies at age 84. Quote Milan’s Teatro alla Scala announced her death without giving a cause. Italian news reports said she had been fighting cancer. Reuters Quote Fracci danced with the top male stars of her age, striking memorable partnerships with Rudolf Nureyev, Erik Bruhn and Vladimir Vasiliev, and was renowned in particular for her interpretation of great romantic ballets, notably "Giselle". Link to comment
dirac Posted May 30, 2021 Author Share Posted May 30, 2021 A review of English National Ballet by Graham Watts for Bachtrack. Quote This was the case with Stina Quagebeur’s Take Five Blues, providing yet more proof of her instinctive capacity to illustrate the joy of dance with innate musicality. Inspired by Nigel Kennedy’s violin flirtations with the Paul Desmond jazz classic, Take Five, augmented by Bach’s Vivace, Quagebeur has achieved the difficult challenge of making pure dance accessible and enjoyable for all by mixing moods and evoking spontaneity. Her eight dancers brought unalloyed enthusiasm to showcasing individual strengths, such as when Katja Khaniukova spins tightly, quickly and (apparently) effortlessly across the stage with a genuine smile of childlike joy. The strings of these individual skills were occasionally pulled together into explosions of closely harmonised unity. Quagebeur’s choreography and the ebullient glee of the dancers needed little support although Dave Richardson’s lighting designs provided an adequate substitute for the lost studio effects in Shaun James Grant’s original film. Link to comment
dirac Posted May 31, 2021 Author Share Posted May 31, 2021 An obituary for Carla Fracci from ANSAmed. Quote "Her extraordinary artistic and human qualities made her one of the greatest ballet dancers of our time at the international level". Fracci was born in Milan in 1936 and started out at the La Scala Theatre Ballet School at the age of 10, having Russian dancer Vera Volkova among her teachers. An appreciation from Gramilano. Quote The stars aligned in recent months when La Scala Ballet’s Manuel Legris invited her back to the theatre’s rehearsal studios after an absence of two decades to work with the dancers on the ballet she was most closely associated with, Giselle. This was filmed for internet streaming and also captured for a 12-part documentary series for national television. She filmed tributes for the American Ballet Theatre’s 80th anniversary, Pier Luigi Pizzi’s 90th birthday, and for a celebration on what would have been Alicia Alonso’s 100th birthday. A big-budget biopic of her early life was also filmed, called Carla, and will be transmitted in the autumn. She was also delighted by a thoughtful telephone call from Alessandra Ferri who will soon dance a piece created for Carla by Maurice Béjart. She recorded numerous interviews over the last few months at her home, in television studios and in the foyer and museum at La Scala. It was her swansong period. Link to comment
dirac Posted May 31, 2021 Author Share Posted May 31, 2021 An interview with Sergei Polunin by Annabel Sampson in Tatler. Quote Polunin admits that it was the global Covid restrictions that carved out an opportunity for him to finally create the book, a project that he previously felt he wasn’t ready for. ‘I’m young and I didn't want to be narcissistic about it and to be like, “Oh, I’m 20-something and I’m writing a book,” but when you’re 31, it's kind of a good place to sum up certain things.’ He admits it’s been ‘a lot of work’ involving ‘pure concentration’ (of course, there’s the added complication of translations given Polunin has a global following). Link to comment
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