Tuesday, February 1

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Q&A with Lynn Garafola about her new book, "La Nijinska" by Marina Harss in the Fjord Review.
 

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You had written on the Russian émigré critic André Levinson before. Did the experience of reading everything he wrote about Nijinska change your way of thinking about him?

Absolutely. When Joan Acocella and I did our Levinson book, neither of us had a real sense of this Russia Abroad. We were really anxious to document Levinson, and the nearest we got was going to the Bibliothèque Nationale and literally turning the pages of Comœdia. At that point, I didn’t know of any other way of looking for his reviews. We were only there for a short time. How he fit into the Russian emigration was something that really came out through this last book. I was appalled as I began looking again through numerous reviews of his at how he was treating NIjinska.

 

 

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David Hallberg talks about what he looks for in young dancers.

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Hallberg says dancers can be their own worst enemies, in the studio and on stage.

 

“It’s so easy to get in your head and start psyching yourself out or obsessing about one thing,” he says. “We become so self-critical and obsessed with the refinement of the technique we can lose the sense of why people enjoy the way we dance. They like to watch people express dance, not execute dance.”

 

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Federico Bonelli is appointed the new artistic director of Northern Ballet.

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Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli has been appointed the new artistic director of Northern Ballet. The appointment follows an extensive search by the company, whose current artistic director, David Nixon, will be standing down after 21 years in post.

 

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Donald Mahler has died at age 88.

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Mr. Tudor was Mr. Mahler’s artistic mentor. But Ms. Byer said that for personal guidance, Mr. Mahler was dedicated to the teachings of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba, who died in 1969. (Among several other American dancers who became Baba’s followers were Viola Farber and Peter Saul of Merce Cunningham’s company. Many of them, including Mr. Mahler, had studied ballet in New York with Margaret Craske, who had lived in Baba’s community in India during World War II.)

 

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An interview with Helgi Tomasson by Rachel Howard in The San Francisco Chronicle.

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Another moment was when he encountered responses to Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering” being performed in recent years in Europe. “I heard that people there said, ‘Oh no, that work is old-fashioned,’” Tomasson recalled, “and it’s timeless to me. So maybe that was a small moment when I thought of stepping down. If an audience doesn’t want to see that anymore, then someone else has to take over and let them do what they think new audiences should see.”

 

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Present and former dancers of San Francisco Ballet talk about working with Tomasson.

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Joanna Berman Mandel

Company member: 1984-2002
Current role: Regisseur, Diablo Ballet; instructor, Marin Ballet and City Ballet

I was hired by (then co-director) Michael (Smuin) in 1984. Then in July 1985 Helgi came. He was starting something new, whether we were there already or not. He was building something from the ground up. We grew technically from the expectations and the training, but more than that by all the repertoire that was being created on us, and it was so much fun. Helgi was bringing in choreographers who were hot but not everyone knew — Bintley, Kudelka, Forsythe.

 

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The home of the founder of Atlanta Ballet, which includes the company's first studio, is up for sale.

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Since it was built in 1916, this home has undergone several notable transformations, the most recent involving such recognizable names as Atlanta architect, Bill Litchfield, and contractor, Mike Hammersmith.