Thursday, September 7

[dirac]

Ballet Austin revives Stephen Mills' "Hamlet."

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Knowing a good thing, Ballet Austin has revived "Hamlet" three times. Companies ranging from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., and Augsburg, Germany, have brought Mills in to stage it. Oklahoma City Ballet plans to add its name to the "Hamlet" playlist in October.

"It's always different because you don't know the dancers in advance," Mills says. "So I would cast it as I went along, staging some of the group material. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes not. Some companies are more adept at narrative. Here in Austin, I know the dancers already so we can talk more about characters and relationships."

 

[dirac]

New appointments on the business side at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.

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[Nicholas] Dragga, a Certified Fund Raising Executive, will lead the organization and work alongside the PBT’s new artistic director, Adam W. McKinney. He comes to the PBT after serving as executive director of Ballet Lubbock, a ballet school in Texas, since 2011, where he more than quintupled the school’s budget and grew net assets from $700,000 to $12 million during his tenure.

 

[dirac]

A new documentary goes backstage as the National Ballet of Canada stages "Swan Lake."

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Not only were the dancers learning new choreography, the crew were learning about ballet and how to film it. “There was this infinity mirror between their process and ours,” O’Neill said in a joint video interview with McMullan. “It was a mutual exchange of vulnerability.”