Friday, February 9

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A TV news story on the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's problem with online ticket fraud.

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The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is urging patrons to buy tickets directly from its website or box office after it lost $10,000 to online ticket scammers during its recent production of The Nutcracker.

Related.

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She said tickets were bought by scammers using stolen credit cards and then resold on third-party websites.

“So in January, when unsuspecting people got their credit card statements, they saw random charges for the ballet,” said Unrau. “So they went to their credit card company to get them refunded, which they did, but the credit card companies still needed us to pay for those tickets.”

 

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On the eve of the Super Bowl, Kansas City Ballet challenges San Francisco Ballet to a dance-off.

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“We make it look super easy, but it is very difficult,” said Devon Carney, artistic director Devon Carney at the KC Ballet. “The stamina to be able to do the kind of work that dancers do, they don’t just sprint, they do things that are three to four minutes long so it’s not a single play like in a football game.”

 

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Q&A with Alice Robb on the negative aspects of studying ballet.

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Yeah. Yeah. Talk about the physical toll that ballet put on you like it sounds like like in many competitive sports, you know, of other kinds like you would kind of go through the pain, you dance through the pain.

ROBB: Yeah, I mean, ballet is such an unnatural thing to do. People always think about, oh OK. Dancers have to be thin. Sure. But that's like the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there's also the turnout from the hips, this kind of rotation in your hips, the arches of the feet, flexibility of the joints. There's just so many ways that you can not have the ideal body and, and then have to compensate, another thing about that is you start when you're so young and you kind of fall in love with it so young and you don't really know how your body is gonna develop. So things could be chugging along fine. And then you go on point at 10 or 11 or 12, when you're deemed strong enough. And then you could find that actually your feet, the way your feet are built, makes point even more painful than it does for other people. And just the nature of point is that you're putting the entire weight of your body on the tip of your toes. So it's, you know, it's never going to feel amazing, learn to cope with it. But yeah.

 

Preview in brief of Avant Chamber Ballet's new program.

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The program also features artistic director Katie Puder’s staging of the original Russian choreography for Swan Lake’s Act 2, starring princess-turned-swan Odette and her hero, Prince Siegfried, and Dallas choreographer Paul Mejia’s 1977 Romeo & Juliet, set to a Tchaikovsky score and told through Juliet’s memories from her last hours. The role has been danced by famed ballerinas Suzanne Farrell and Maria Terezia Balogh (Mejia’s former and current wife).

All of the music will be performed by a live orchestra.

 

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 Preview in brief of Avant Chamber Ballet's new program.

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The program also features artistic director Katie Puder’s staging of the original Russian choreography for Swan Lake’s Act 2, starring princess-turned-swan Odette and her hero, Prince Siegfried, and Dallas choreographer Paul Mejia’s 1977 Romeo & Juliet, set to a Tchaikovsky score and told through Juliet’s memories from her last hours. The role has been danced by famed ballerinas Suzanne Farrell and Maria Terezia Balogh (Mejia’s former and current wife).

All of the music will be performed by a live orchestra.

 

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A review of Milwaukee Ballet's Genesis International Choreographic Competition by Jim Higgins in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

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The premise is simple: MB brings in three successful choreographers from around the globe, gives each eight dancers and 90 hours of rehearsal time, and they create original 20-minute dances. The winning choreographer, as judged by a panel of visiting experts, gets a contract to return to create another dance in a future season.

Photo gallery.

 

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Resistance grows to Northern Ballet's plans to replace its orchestra with canned music.

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Now, the Musicians’ Union has demanded the government step-in to provide funding for the inflated costs of touring.

In a petition signed by 14,445 supporters, the MU and Northern Ballet Sinfonia members insisted that "world-class orchestra musicians working for an Arts Council England national portfolio organisation should not have to rely on foodbanks to survive."

 

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Kansas City Ballet revives "Peter Pan."

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That score is by Carmen DeLeone, Cincinnati Ballet’s music director for the past 50 years.

“Carmen and I are good friends,” Carney said. “He is just so adventurous in the way he writes his music. It’s very big. He’s a percussionist and a jazz musician and a classically trained French hornist, who played with as well as conducted the Cincinnati Symphony. He knows his stuff. To this day, he still performs in a jazz band, so there’s a jazzy feel to the music.”

 

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A new documentary takes as its subject the young Nigerian Ballet student Anthony Madu.

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But thanks to the attention gained from a viral video of him performing, the prestigious Elmhurst Ballet School in London, England, offers Anthony a scholarship to study abroad with them for the next seven years. Inevitably, the life-changing opportunity comes with its fair share of thorny repercussions that will reshape his young identity. Co-directed by Matthew Ogens (Oscar-nominated for the 2021 documentary short “Audible”) and Nigerian filmmaker Joel ‘Kachi Benson, the inspirational doc “Madu” forgoes talking heads, opting for the observational approach to chronicle his first year in a new environment far away from home.

 

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The Royal Opera House partners with the MS Society to provide a dance residency for peole with multiple sclerosis.

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Louise Cabral, 56, from London: 

I always danced all my life. That was known as part of my personality. MS can take really important things away from you. You feel like part of your personality was amputated, I’m no longer ‘Louise the dancer.’ 

I never thought I would have the opportunity to dance at the Opera House, especially because I have MS. But, no it is because I have MS! It’s a dream come true. 

 

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Jessica Lang talks about her new piece for the Royal Ballet, "Twinkle."

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Lang loved the brief and set to work on what was to become Twinkle – and if that immediately evokes "twinkle twinkle little star" in your mind, you’re spot on. That was indeed the charming children’s lullaby that inspired the work.

‘I couldn’t get this idea of "twinkle twinkle" out of my head. I literally saw [RB principal] William Bracewell, the piano, the star… but I wondered if that was big enough… I thought, I’m going to have to add something to it. So, the lullaby, the childhood memories of this delicate tune, if we stay in that world of childhood and nighttime and lullabies and the stars, going to sleep, well, then let’s go to Brahms' Cradle Song...."