Friday, June 21

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Fort Wayne Ballet announces its 2024-25 season.

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The season opens Oct. 18 and 19 with a production of “Don Quixote” at Pearl Street Arts Center, a venue expected to open in the fall in the eastern third of the former Perfection Bakery downtown. Executive Director Jim Sparrow says he and the Ballet’s artistic team have been through the space, which has “a lot of really positive elements.”

 

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A review of the Royal Ballet's Ashton Celebrated by Roslyn Sulcas in The New York Times.

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Ashton’s work is still regularly performed at the Royal Ballet and vital to its identity. British critics may grumble both about which ballets are performed and about a loss of nuance in their execution. But it would be hard to grouse much during the past two weeks of Ashton Celebrated, a mini-festival of work, running through Saturday at the Royal Opera House, which put the choreographer’s genius — and the English classical dance style — on abundant display in often remarkable performances. (Ashton Celebrated also included performances by the Sarasota Ballet of small-scale Ashton rarities at the smaller Linbury Theater.)

 

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A review of the Sarasota Ballet in London by Leigh Witchel for dancelog.nyc.

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The disappointment of both The Royal Ballet’s selection of short pieces by Ashton, and Sarasota’s here wasn’t in the performances, but that we learned little about Ashton by seeing them. With the exception of Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, none of Ashton’s miniatures showed him to be a deft miniaturist, and with Brahms, as Ashton implied in the title, he was imitating someone who was a miniaturist.

 

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Profiles of the dance nominees of this year's Prix Benois de la Danse by Ilona Landgraf in her blog, "Landgraf on Dance." (A previous post previewed the nominees in choregraphy.)

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Artemy Belyakov, a Bolshoi Ballet dancer since 2010 and appointed principal dancer since 2019, was nominated for his performance of Ivan IV in Yuri Grigorovich's "Ivan the Terrible."

Belyakov’s colleague Vladislav Lantratov, also a principal of the Bolshoi Ballet, was previously awarded the Prix Benois in 2018. This season, he was nominated for his interpretation of the leading male role, Herman, in The Queen of Spades, Yuri Possokhov’s latest choreography for the Bolshoi.

 

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An NBC News story on Queer the Ballet.

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“I regret how I felt in ballet spaces during that time, because I had to leave so much of the best parts of me outside. I don’t think ballet got the best parts of me, and that’s a shame,” said Pierce, the founder and artistic director of Queer the Ballet, an organization promoting LGBTQ representation and visibility in professional ballet. 

 

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A report on the English National Ballet School's graduate performance by Deborah Weiss in Bachtrack.

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It was, however, Jonah Glickman who raised eyebrows in his Talisman variation. Big jump, stretched feet, a spinner and exceptional flexibility – and as if that wasn’t enough, he ripped onto the stage with a larger than life personality. More of him later...