Monday, June 1 Options

[dirac]

How Oregon Ballet Theatre is dealing with its financial crisis, by Barry Johnson in The Oregonian.

The Regional Arts & Cultural Council and Executive Director Eloise Damrosch are directly responsible for the care and feeding of local arts groups, and they have a lot of experience with troubled companies, too.RACC has already helped OBT, responding to the ballet's request for help in February with a grant of $25,000 from its emergency fund and another $10,000 to help the company pay for a consultant, who turned out to be Thorn.

Damrosch's reasons for helping OBT also help us form the basis for thinking about future rescue efforts -- and in this economy, all arts organizations are under stress

[dirac]

Notes on Natalia Osipova by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker.

Natalia Osipova, twenty-three years old—she still has fat cheeks—joined the Bolshoi at the age of seventeen and was immediately tagged as a spitfire. If you look her up on YouTube, you’ll see why. She’s cheerful, fast, and strong—a classic can-do—and she has a miraculous jump.

[dirac]

Alexei Ratmansky is interviewed by Robert Hilferty for Bloomberg News.

“It’s hard for me to watch the pieces I did at the beginning because I feel they are not complex enough, not shaped,” he said. “I’m learning to develop the structure and themes, as a composer takes a theme and varies it. Using less material and getting more out of it -- that’s what I’m doing with dance.”

Ratmansky sees his style, known for vibrancy and emotional punch, as the sum of all his influences, from classical to Diaghilev-era experiments, Balanchine to Forsythe. “I like using all the classical academic steps because some of them are quite spectacular and not used a lot nowadays,” Ratmansky said. “And I like the idea of being international. I’m considered very Western in Russia, and the opposite here. Maybe I do it on purpose.”

[dirac]

A KATU news feature on the plight of Oregon Ballet Theatre.

To help save the 20-year-old company, they’ve planned a benefit performance on June 12 called Dance United. The show will include performances from some of the most prominent ballet companies in the country, including those from New York City, San Francisco and Boston.

Organizers expect to raise about $350,000 and hope people will make donations to fill the gap.

[dirac]

Nijinsky's paintings are on exhibit in Hamburg.

Nijinsky’s highly impressive paintings are here for the first time presented in the context of modern art in Paris after 1910. Around 100 drawings by Nijinsky, mostly from the John Neumeier Foundation, will be juxtaposed with important paintings by the Russian artists Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Alexandra Exter, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, Léopold Survage and the Czech painter František Kupka. Like Nijinsky at times, these painters lived in Paris between 1910 and 1925 and worked on the themes of dance, rhythm and motion in a highly abstracted manner. Strong colours, arches, concentric circles, ellipses and sweeping curves dominate their compositions. The paintings are marked by a strong, rhythmic accent and call to mind a dance motion or the musical progression of a film sequence. In their dynamism the physical presence of the human figure on the canvas links up with the light, the shapes and the vibrations of the cosmos to build up to a stirring dance of colours.

[Helene]

Marc Haegeman reviews Royal Ballet of Flanders in "Artifact" for danceviewtimes.

Seeing "Artifact" in Antwerp had me wondering though whether it wouldn't have been preferable for this talented company to acquire the suite instead of the complete thing. Others like the Paris Opera or San Francisco Ballet have done this to their great advantage. The full-length "Artifact" on the other hand doesn't particularly seem to have aged well, nor is it Forsythe's most accomplished opus -- and if one buys from a second-hand store, one better makes sure it's the best available for there's no return policy. The most rewarding moments for dancers and audience occur in the second part, which amply demonstrates the choreographer's once new but still compelling movement style, yet the remainder of the show adds little or nothing to the company's glory, or indeed to the audience's money. The trouble is that while Forsythe is at his most memorable in his pure dance passages, the accompanying theatrics simply don't stand the same repeated viewing. Unfortunately in the full-length "Artifact" it's the latter that rule the proceedings.

[dirac]

A review of Pacific Northwest Ballet in 'Dances at a Gathering' by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times.

Today I find the work’s fascination only deepens. Watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s beautifully danced new production last weekend at McCaw Hall here — staged by Susan Hendl and Ben Huys — I felt more than ever the many layers of Robbins’s achievement.

The basis, surely, is his choice of — and response to — Chopin music. Robbins’s dances answer the music — sensitively played here by the pianist Allan Dameron — in an often impressionistic, indeed highly fragmented way: the people onstage (each wearing a different color) seem to hear it as an undercurrent or an atmosphere that they sometimes resist.

[Edited by Helene to add: The photo caption leaves off Carla Korbes to the far right as Girl in Mauve.]

[dirac]

A preview of the Royal Ballet's Kennedy Center engagement by Jeremy D. Birch in Playbill.

Founding choreographer Frederick Ashton’s much-loved A Month in the Country features music by Chopin and beautiful period designs by Julia Trevelyan Oman. The ballet, which was choreographed by Ashton at the age of 69, follows the emotional drama of Ivan Turgenev’s play, in which a young tutor’s presence disturbs the calm of a Russian household. Remarking on the premiere performance in 1976, Time Magazine lauded it as “an airy confection of elegant humor, bittersweet lyricism, and charm.”

Christopher Wheeldon’s pulsing, energetic DGV (Danse à grande vitesse) is an imaginative meditation on travel created for the Company in 2006 to music by Michael Nyman. London’s Guardian hailed it as “stunning…a thing of grand scale and hurtling momentum.” Michael Nyman originally wrote the score—Musique à grande vitesse—for the inauguration of the TGV north European high-speed train line and it was first performed in Lille, France in 1993.

[Helene]

Apollinaire Scherr previews and reviews American Ballet Theatre's "All Prokofiev" program in her blog foot in mouth.

The ending is really affecting--abandonment always is--as is the opening scene where the soldier has come home to cherry blossoms in bloom and is overwhelmed with a placeless desire that spins his head (and his body, of course, this being ballet). But in between there just isn't enough time to establish the characters. For example, what's the attraction of this bouncy new girl? (Maybe it's just that she mirrors his own jaggedy energy: the steps were very good at conveying not some ideal, but a real person--edgy and always the center of attention). And, other than being the soldier's lover, who is this woman who has waited for him, and what was he to her that she would wait? Part is quivery with disappointment and abjection even before she has been rejected--and maybe that's the point. It doesn't matter who he is, she--this kind of woman--will always lose him.

Scherr also writes on of NYCB in "Opus 19: The Dreamer" and Benjamin Millepied's newest work.

[dirac]

New research suggests that some female ballet dancers may be vulnerable to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease also suffered by female athletes.

The researchers found a high prevalence of disordered eating, menstrual dysfunction, and a history of primary amenorrhea (32 percent, 27 percent, and 18 percent, respectively) among the subjects. They also observed that nearly one-third (32 percent) of the women had low bone mineral density and that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) had abnormal brachial artery flow mediated dilation.

[dirac]

A review of the Bern Ballet in “Wuthering Heights” by Clement Crisp in The Financial Times.

It is described by its choreographer as “a personal response” to the narrative: we are told that she has “chosen to reflect only on the first half of the novel and also to reduce the characters to five”, and has “multiplied” Heathcliff and Catherine to “amplify their inner thoughts and emotions”. Given these brazen get-out clauses, I report that the ensuing gymnastics could as well have been “inspired” by The Critique of Pure Reason or Grace Louise Richmond’s Round the Corner in Gay Street. The stage is occupied by two grey wedge-shapes and a small, off-kilter box, under which dancers seek what should be refuge from their frightful tasks. Above, an assemblage of telegraph wires that descend, as the evening drags its cheerless feet, to no apparent purpose. Lighting is, as we say, “atmospheric”.