Baby Talk At The Ballet
Rather than hasty promotions, the dance world should remain prudent
Recent performances at New York City Ballet confirmed that only now, 27 years after George Balanchine’s death, do we see the full ramifications of his infatuation with very young dancers. Traditionally, a ballet company’s highest-ranked dancers were so ranked because they had mastered principal roles. But decades before he died in 1983, Balanchine began taking the youngest dancers and assigning them principal roles in repertory, as well as making new roles to suit their particular gifts. Balanchine’s policies generally worked for him, but it would now seem that on-the-job training has hardened into dogma, spreading globally—and not to the benefit of the art form. Read more
Keep Dancing
The annual Dance on Camera film festival celebrates the bodies and the brains of dancers—young and old
By Susan Reiter
Whatever your idea of a dance film might be, you can find an example of it at the 38th annual Dance on Camera Festival. From feature-length documentaries to four-minute animated shorts, it’s all there during the five days of extensive and varied programming. If the idea of sitting in a dark theater with athletic bodies hurling themselves through the air intimidates you, then maybe watching it onscreen can be a start. The festival begins Jan. 29, at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, with the U.S. premiere of Jeff McKay’s history of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Forty Years of One Night Stands, and ends Feb. 2 with the world premiere of Michael Backwood’s New York Dance. Read more
Not Rocking The Boat
Rasta Thomas tries for a frenetic hybrid of ballet and street
An increasingly powerful urge among ballet companies these days is to take the shortest and easiest routes to popularization. Dilution and gimmickry are rationalized as being necessary for the art form’s continued survival in a very hostile, anti-aesthetic environment. The impetus to galvanize new or potential audiences by presenting ballet at its well-rehearsed, appropriately-cast and dimensionally-interpreted best is considerably less apparent.
Rasta Thomas’ Rock the Ballet, starring his “Bad Boys,” closed Jan. 3 after three weeks at the Joyce Theater. Read more
Modern Classics
For Judith Jamison’s 20th anniversary with Alvin Ailey, she choreographed with her muse in mind: Clifton Brown
By Susan Reiter
Judith Jamison calls Clifton Brown “my muse,” and for her latest dance, Among Us (Private Spaces: Public Places), he is not only performing a pivotal solo role but also serving as her choreographic assistant. She developed her movement ideas with him before she began working with the full cast of 11. The piece, which has its premiere Dec. 4, is part of a festive Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season (Dec. 2–Jan. 3 at City Center) that celebrates Jamison’s 20th anniversary as artistic director. Read more
On and Off the Pedestal
Get ready for Renée Fleming as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier
Recent experiences in studios, performance spaces and Lincoln Center citadels have confirmed some fundamental, enduring and topical performance trends and traits. Namely, that ballet would like to please and to inspire admiration without seeming to ask for it. Post-modern dance seeks actively to repulse and discombobulate. And opera, it’s equally clear, is trying now to come down a bit closer to earth.
Mid-November in a New York City Ballet rehearsal studio, Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow coached NYCB’s Janie Taylor and Tyler Angle in the duet that Verdy and Ludlow had created in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream 47 years ago. Read more
Splendid Isolation
The 92nd Street Y continues its influence on modern dance
Talk about going back to the source: The 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association 75th-anniversary Gala earlier this month featured works by great modern dance choreographers and performers who danced, taught or gave their first concert there. The Y’s concert hall stage is not built with dance in mind, since it’s smaller than ideal. But when a dance program was first developed a few years after the building went up, oddly enough, the then-director of education, William Kolodney, initially turned to the ballet world’s Mikhail Fokine, who wasn’t interested. Read more
Talk to God
In a new doc, Brigitte Lefèvre is shown in the trenches
Ballet in America lives hand to mouth and day to day. In Paris it most assuredly does not, as is made clear in Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, which premieres in the United States with a two-week run at Film Forum beginning Nov. 4.
The Opera is home to one of the world’s greatest ballet companies, bureaucratized in the best sense of the word. Generously funded by the French government, its dancers are furnished by the company’s own first-rate school. Funding stability means that we see in La Danse long-range (three years ahead) planning that doesn’t happen all that often in much of the ballet world. Read more
Preparing for Act Two
Career Transition for Dancers’ gala celebrates what comes next
By Susan Reiter
It’s a moment of truth that all dancers face eventually. At some point, they must leave the stage that has been their home and livelihood, usually since a very early age. For some, it comes after a long, fulfilling career, when the body starts letting them know it’s time. For others, a traumatic injury can precipitate a much more abrupt departure. In the current economy, with even major, acclaimed companies cutting back their rosters, a young dancer who anticipates many more years of performing might suddenly face the loss of what had seemed like a secure job. Read more
Round and Round
Exploring movement and meaning during Works & Process
There’s a deliberate asymmetry, as well as a measured dialogue between projection and recession in the Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theater. The theater functions as a subterranean microcosm of the museum itself. Its circular shape binds the auditorium’s constituent parts into a continuum of perpetuum mobile, in which you sit facing other audience members as well as the stage.
This is where Mary Sharp Cronson has convened the “Works & Process” series for the last 25 years, in which performers—usually dancers or musicians—do things and then talk about what they’ve just done. Read more
Hot Screen
Veronika Part makes her Letterman debut, but dancers continue to express themselves best in movement
Over the summer, hosannas went out over the blogosphere when American Ballet Theatre’s Veronika Part appeared on a segment of David Letterman’s Late Show. Ken Tucker, a writer for Entertainment Weekly, contrasted today’s media environment unfavorably to the “bygone era” when after-hours talk shows on TV were “filled with all sorts of performers, not just movie and TV stars plugging their latest product.” Tucker and many others were thrilled to see Part sit down with Dave. Read more
