Sunday, December 12

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Q&A with the Australian Ballet's Dana Stephensen.

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What was the most difficult part about your return to work?

Getting used to being in a room full of people. When I first started back, that was incredibly daunting. It wasn’t that it didn’t feel like home, but the company has moved on, the energy is different, we have a new artistic director. It wasn’t like putting on warm, fuzzy slippers. It was new and I had to find my place, and a lot of that is confidence. The mental road always takes the longest; it’s the tougher road than the physical.

 

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Mark Monahan writes on the "woke" movement in ballet for The Sunday Telegraph.

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I’d long been wondering when ballet companies everywhere might start to “woke up”. And, although the Royal Ballet (quietly) overhauled the Chinese Dance in its Nutcracker in 2016, with New York City Ballet (more loudly) following suit in 2017, 2021 felt like the year when some kind of genuine momentum began to gather on this side of the Atlantic.

 

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A review of Tulsa Ballet's Nutcracker by James D. Watts Jr. for Tulsa World.

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Friday’s world premiere performance of this work, created through the collaborative efforts of choreographers Val Caniparoli and Ma Cong, with colorful costumes and evocative set designs by Tracy Grant Lord augmented by projections designed by Shawn Boyle, was a crowd-pleaser from start to finish, captivating everyone from the booster-seat crowd to seen-it-all cynics such as myself.

 

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Austin City Ballet's Nutcracker returns to the stage.

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Being a nomadic studio is definitely difficult — "toting props and costumes around 24/7 and paying for 450 square feet of storage space every month is tough," D'Avila said. "But we keep on keeping on."

Among the biggest challenges, D'Avila said, was the loss of longtime teacher and choreographer Terri Lynn Wright, who died of cancer on Dec. 10, 2020, the day that last year's Nutcracker was supposed to open.

 

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An obituary for Marjorie Tallchief by Anna Kisselgoff in The New York Times.

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Their father, Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, a member of the Osage Nation, lived off his share of the oil revenues that had been negotiated with the federal government after oil was discovered on the Osage reservation in Fairfax, Okla. Their mother, Ruth (Porter) Tall Chief, a homemaker of Scottish-Irish descent, encouraged the girls to study ballet and moved the family to Beverly Hills, Calif., in search of more professional ballet teachers.

 

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Nevada Ballet Theatre's Nutcracker returns to the stage.

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On opening night, Roy Kaiser, NBT's artistic director, welcomed the audience to the first performance of NBT since February 2020. The company, founded by dancer Nancy Hassell 50 years ago, is celebrating its golden anniversary in 2021.

Choreographed by James Canfield, audiences can enjoy a full orchestra for select performances by members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic conducted by Donato Cabrera.