Stage performances of the festival will run from August 25 - Sept. 10. At this point I don't an official list of who is performing what at each program. I'll add it as soon as it becomes available.

XI INTERNATIONAL BALLET FESTIVAL / 2006
AUGUST 25 – SEPTEMBER 10

Unveiling Poster / Friday, August 25th
Film Series in Miami / Friday, August 25th to 28th
TOWER THEATER
1508 S.W. 8th Street, Miami, FL
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Film series in Miami Beach / August 31st ­ September 3rd
MIAMI BEACH CINEMATHEQUE
512 Española Way Miami Beach, FL
“Camarata de la Danza”
Friday, September 1st, 5:00-6:00 PM
Contemporary Ballet Performance in the street (Miami Beach)

Dance Film Screen / Saturday, September 2nd , 8:00-10:00 PM
Lincoln Road Street
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International Young Medal Winner Dance Performance
Wednesday, September 6th , 5:00 PM
GUSMAN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
174 East Flagler Street, Miami, FL
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Contemporary Ballet Performance Tuesday, September 7th, 8:00PM ARTIME THEATER/
900 S.W. 1st Street, Miami, FL
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Classical and Neoclassical Ballets Grand Gala Performance
Friday, September 8th , 8:00 PM
KRAVIS CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
701 Okeechobee Boulevard, West Palm Beach, FL
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Etoile’s Classical Grand Gala Performance
Saturday, September 9th , 8:00 PM
Alberto Alonso
Recipient of "A life for Dance" Lifetime Achievement Award
The International Ballet Festival of Miami will present the award, "A life for Dance" to the renowned Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso who exiled to the United States in 1993.
JACKIE GLEASON THEATER
1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, FL
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Festival Closing Theater Sunday, September 10TH, 3:00 PM
JACKIE GLEASON THEATER
1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, FL

Well, the big performances start within a week, and I STILL can't find a list of who will be performing and what will be performed either in Miami or at West Palm (at the Kravis), the performance I will be attending.

Their website (see post above) has been amended to add only the following: Lorena Feijoo and Rolando Sarabia will be performing at the "Etoile and Classic Grand Gala" performance at Miami on Saturday, Sept. 9.

Neglecting to mention the participants (with those two exceptions) seems a rather peculiar way to market a ballet festival scheduled for large theaters and charging high ticket prices.

Does anyone have further information?

bart, I know a few dancers who are preparing to perform at various events, but until there is an official announcement, is it not considered gossip?

I may be at Gusman on Wednesday evening and Kravitz on Friday night. The website does not seem to be very clear about whether or not Kravitz is happening. I will wait to buy my ticket for Kravitz to hear more about it on Wednesday.

http://www.kravis.org/index.cfm?fuseaction...d=264&x=6882470

Here is the Kravitz link which gives companies and countries, but no dancers.

Thanks, vrsfanatic, for that link. This is new info on the site; it was not there a week ago.

Based on last year, these will be short excerpts or ballets. I know that Ballet Florida's Gemini (Ben Stevenson) is a pas de deux for 2 men. (I don't know who will be dancing it, but Tracy Mozingo and Stephen Dori do it best.)

I'm actually rather intrigued at getting the chance to see so many unfamiliiar companies. I'm especially hopeful about whomever shows up from Carla Fracci's Rome Opera Ballet (which I missed out on last summer) and whoever comes from San Francisco and Ib Anderson's company in Arizona. And it will be nice to get a glimpse of the Teatro de Colon (which I gather is on the way up) as well as the dancers from Spain ( ), Portugal, Poland, Brasil, etc. And the San Carlo of Naples! I haven't a clue about most of these companies -- but they're certainly based in marvellous places!

Last year there were 2 dancers from Stuttgart, but the POB dancers did not appear despite being listed. The unifying theme is "classical and neo-classical," which -- in my experience -- can mean almost anything.

Anyone else going to one of these performances?

Here's what's proposed for Friday at the Kravis Center, West Palm Beach --

The West Palm Beach peformance was last night.

Due to an almost complete absence of publicity , the 2000-plus seat opera house was only about 1/4 full, which must have been a huge disappointment to all the dancers and a considerable financial loss for the promoters. A short article in the back of the weekly culture/entertainment guide (Palm Beach Post, published the day of the performance, was all I saw about this in the press. Several people I spoke to had never heard of the event until reading that.

Even a check on Google turned up almost nothing. Someone was asleep on this. Last year, an almost full house -- rapturously, even excessively, enthusiastic -- attended the Festival's first West Palm outing.

There was some superb dancing and some dancing that was barely professional. The selection committee really has to think about which sort of companies it invites. Just being "international" -- or "hispanic", for that matter -- should not be enough.

Highlights (for me) tended to come at the end of this overly-long evening:

-- a really smashing Corsaire pas de deux from Silvina Perillo and Heran Piquin of Teatro Colon (Argentina); they danced with passion and as though they were inventing every movement spontaneously; Perillo had speed with subtlety; Piquin's speed was prodigious, and his character had elements of raw, princely pride (a barbarian prince) I've never seen in this role before.

-- Ballet Arizona's pas de deux from Ib Anderson's "Amoroso": Paola Hartley, Astrict Zejnati.

-- the local team: Ballet Florida's male pas de deux, "Gemini," (Vicente Nebrada). This ballet gets better and better; Tracy Mozingo has always been wonderful in it; Marcus Shafer, whom I first saw in the other role last season, has grown tremendously; and, the lighting provided by the company's own team was greatly superior to the standard provided to visiting dancers by the Festival team. The Nebrada choreography, slow and extremely fluid, with its suggestion of planets rotating nd revolving in a lonely outer space, really grows on you.

-- Nafas Dance Company of Spain, a modern pas de deux from "Caduta Libera" by Patrick de Banas, with Aida Badia. De Banas, who danced with Bejart and Duarto, is a powerful and sensuous mover.

A few things I learned about ballet at this performance:

-- The big bravura pas de deux are almost all fundamentally the same;

-- Dancers with incredible balance, or some other isolated skill turning, but with very little else, do relatively well with Gala audiences -- as long as they keep grinning;

-- Audiences down here will applaud a string of indifferently performed turns and jumps but will not notice that the dancer is unable to land accurately, consistently, or even facing in the right direction;

-- advice to female dancers: When everything else fails, just throw in a huge battement tendu, an elaborate arabeque, a big smile, or a complicated lift to end the messy combination: it makes everything all right;

-- advice to male dancers: turning your partners is not the same thing as turning a clay pot on an out of control wheel: your hands should be near invisible and not tense and weighted; and you should try to avoid biting your lip or looking down at here waist in panic;

-- the Vasily Vainonen version of "Flames of Paris" is certainly among the cheesiest pas de deux in the repertory;

-- further advice to male dances: when performing entrechat-six it is usually expected that both feet will move equally (otherwise it's an entrechat-tois, I guess); the brise-vole steps in Bluebird's variation need to be done equally on both sides;

Some other dancers I'd like to see more of:

-- Daniela Buson (Tulsa Ballet, "Lady of the Camellias" pas de deux)
-- Filipa Castro, (companhia Nacional de Bailado, Portugal), "Don Quixote" pas de deux);
-- all four of the young dancers from Kompania Primavera (Poland) in something less cliched and puerile than Darek Lewandowski's "Muslim's Prayer."

Coming up Saturday and Sunday in Miami (but completely UN-publicized by the producers): Ashley Bouder (NYCB) and Joseph Philips (SFB) in someting from "Stars and Stripes"; Adiarys Almeida and Joseph Gatti (Cincinnatti Ballet) in" Le Corsaire" pas de deux; Lorena Feijoo (SFB) and Rolando Saraia (Houston) in "Don Quixote" pas de deux.

This could be the Jeopardy! clue answered by, "What do ballet fans and figure skating fans have in common?" Most ballet galas remind me of figure skating exhibitions, not my favorite genre.

Thank you so much for the re-cap! It's such a shame that this was so little publicized. I'm hoping that, if nothing else, the appearances of Feijoo and Sarabia are being talked about within the Cuban-American community in Miami, and that there will be better turn-out. Bouder and Phillips will likely perform the Pas de Deux (fourth movement) of Stars and Stripes, which should be very exciting, along with a chance to see the post-competition Gatti.

I'm glad that Hartley (a native of Chile) and Zejnati were highlights. I went to Ballet Arizona originally to see Magnicaballi, whom I had seen dance with Suzanne Farrell Ballet in Berkeley, and fell in love with Hartley, and I was very glad that Zejnati landed there, after two stints with PNB.

Wow! Wonderful news (that she's performing, not that it is unpublicized). Please tell us how it goes.

drb, unfortunately we're about 2 hours north of Miami, and I no longer undertake that kind of drive at night. (The I-95 is where Florida's wildly underfunded state mental health system dumps its chronically unstable drivers.)

Helene, your comments about Hartley and Zejnati made me anxious to learn more about them, and Andersen's company. I returned to a detailed set of reviews of Ballet Arizona you posted in 2004. Both dancers feature there. And the qualities you describe are just what I saw last night. A LINK to that 2004 discussion is here: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.p...=0&#entry137958 Scroll up.

Seeing them here, I was impressed by the utter stylishness and theatricality (in a good sense) of the choreography: very passionate, flowing, modernized neoclassical. Costumes were stunning. It made me wish that it were more possible for exceptional regional companies like this to be seen outside their own geographic areas. Andersen was an impressive and memorable dancer at NYCB. It's wonderful to see how dedicated he has become as an AD -- and how devoted to Balanchine's work and spirit he is. Reminds me of Villella in that.

A trip to the Joyce or City Center just doesn't do it. We need a national PBS series of televised company profiles and performances . If I were King .... (sigh).

-ing and -ing at the same time.

The inconsistent quality of the dancers and the lack of prior publicity make me wonder if this was put together in a hurry. Too bad. Maybe the presenters will begin planning for next year's event now. If they have the money to consider a program next year.Bart for King!

A wonderful idea for Dance in America -- Dance . . . in America! Maybe a two-hour survey of what's going on at MCB, PNB, BalletArizona, etc. I think it would be fascinating, and may even draw local viewers who are not usually ballet audiences for the Dance in America series (to the extent that it remains a series).

Or, perhaps, films like 32tendu's documentary on Gen Horiuchi and the St. Louis Ballet could be picked up nationally on PBS, giving incentive for local filmmakers to feature local companies.

I'm all for that. But you'd still need an umbrella organization and theme to reduce the inevitable pressures from local stations to opt out from anything "not perceived as relevant" to their own particular market. After all, there are all those people out there just dying to watch another Suze Orman fund-raising special or that Lawrence Welk show they missed back in 1957.

How about a "Sons and Daughters of Balanchine" series -- perhaps narrated or introduced by a nationally known figure (who? Suzanne Farrell?). This could be perceived as relevant to quite a lot of the United States: Washington DC (Farrell's company), San Francisco, Arizona, North Carolina, Miami, Pacific Northwest, etc., etc. I don't know Horiuichi's biography; would he qualify as a "Son of Balanchine"? Boal would, I think.

The point would be that we have a great and uniquely decentralized "national" ballet -- and that it has been created and sustained by several generations of"American" leaders (even those who were immigrants). Stressing American uniqueness is something you have to talk about a lot in order to get a play on pbs.

NYCB itself is in its own exalted league, and Martins lacks warmth on tv: should they be included in this?

Each show could follow a template outline: perhaps an overview of the company, a short biog and "day in the life" of its Artistic Director; then rehearsal and company class shots and interviews with key dancers; shots of fans and of kids at the company school; and -- as a finale -- a complete one-act ballet staged especially for the tv cameras. British tv used to do this kind of thing very well. You should be able to quite a lot of this in 90 minutes per company, or even 60 minutes if you're fanatical about brevity.

I'd rather have briefer profiles of the companies, with emphasis on the dancing. And rather than a new work staged for the cameras (is that what you had in mind, bart?), a well photographed presentation of one or two of their trademark ballets, depending on length. If I were Empress . . .

Me too. I was just thinking that there would be broader community support for the former.
Me too. By "staged especially for the tv cameras," I was thinking this would provide uniformity and quality of visual and production style from one company to another: all sharing the same director, camera people, lighting people, etc.

It would help if we were King and Empress. But, when you think of it, all this really requires is someone with vision, courage, and power in the public television world -- and, of course, an arts-loving charitable foundation.

Here's Sharon McDaniel's review of the performance, "Ballet arfound the world a bumpy journey." (Palm Beach Post.)
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/pbccentral/co...eview_0910.html

And here's Guillermo Perez's review of the Saturday performance (with the bigger guns) in Miami. (Thanks, dirac, for the Link.)
Was I reading correctly? Did he actually describe Ashley Bouder's Balanchine as "efficient"?

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/lifes...tures-headlines

Not only efficient but Bouder was "pert," too.

Isn't that a shampoo?

Yes. Add water and it bubbles!

Well, it IS the rainy season here.