"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
Up to date announcements of company seasons, featured artists and special programming as well as grant of awards such as Princess Grace, or artistic appointments
It’s been less than two years since Boston Dance Theater made its debut, but the company made enough of an impression to garner major support from Global Arts Live — not once, but twice, an impressive coup for co-directors Jessie Jeanne Stinnett and Dutch-Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili. Friday night’s program backed up this artistic imprimatur with three newly commissioned world premieres and a US premiere.
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“The Nutcracker” is a beloved tradition in our family, in part because the multiracial and multiethnic families in the Richmond Ballet production’s opening party scene look like ours.
I first noticed this diversity three years ago, when my oldest daughter played a mouse. I thought it must have been a fluke. But since then, the cast has become even more diverse, while professional dancers have come and gone. Stoner Winslett, the ballet’s longtime artistic director, says she made the decision to have multiracial families in the party scene when she directed her first “Nutcracker” production in 1980.
“Ballet is an incredibly beautiful thing,” she says, “and I think it should be for everybody.”
DOWNTOWN SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Madeleine Scott is the founder of the South Dakota Ballet. She and other founding board members are trying to raise enough money to start a professional ballet company in South Dakota. The company’s first fundraiser will be Thursday at the Museum of Visual Materials in Downtown Sioux Falls. It’s from 6:30 PM until 8:30 PM.
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The orchestrations are playful, surprising, imaginative. Ms. Dorrance and her collaborators on the project, Josette Wiggan-Freund and Hannah Heller, have responded in kind. The three, who have worked together several times before, share credit for the concept. “It’s been a collaborative process from the beginning,” Ms. Dorrance said. “There is a wonderful sisterhood inside of this process.”
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Crystal Pite is working against the clock. In a bright rehearsal studio at the Royal Opera House she has just a matter of weeks to make her first work for the .
She talks fast, with a constant flow of suggestions, the dancers riding on her stream of consciousness. The choreography seems to reveal itself organically, like a game of Twister — where could this limb go next? It reminds me of the Paul Klee quote that drawing is “taking a line for a walk”. There’s a sinuous thread running through the dancers’ bodies as the equilibrium shifts. Pite is in the middle of things, moving limbs, trying to solve the puzzle. “Agh, I don’t know!” she laughs. Then something falls into place. “Aah, that’s gorgeous!”
“I’ve had to get used to not knowing what I’m doing in front of people,” she tells me later, talking about the pressure of creating work live in the room. “I wing it,” she admits. “And sometimes through the pretending I finally know what I’m doing.”
To follow Pite’s recent career, it certainly seems that she does. The 46-year-old Canadian is the most exciting choreographer in the world right now. She has gathered a plethora of five-star reviews, for The Seasons’ Canon for Paris Opera Ballet, the searing dance-theatre piece Betroffenheit (returning to Sadler’s Wells in April) and the powerful spectacle of Emergence (which Scottish Ballet is bringing to London in June).
Delicate and softly spoken in person, on stage Pite has a strong creative voice and a real ability to connect with audiences, whether through striking large-scale visual impact (such as the Olivier Award-winning Polaris, made for 64 dancers), or more complex interactions of dance and storytelling.
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The past 10 years have seen dance percolate into the nation’s psyche, and engage with both our past and our present as never before. As office workers have clustered around the water cooler on a Monday to rail against the iniquities of Craig Revel Horwood’s voting on Strictly Come Dancing, and Britain’s grandest ballet companies increasingly invited contemporary choreographers from across the globe…
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Ranking among the most well-known ballets today, “The Nutcracker,” first performed in 1892 and popularized in America in the 1960s, is a holiday ritual for many dance companies and families alike.
But for the second year in a row, Sacramento Ballet is presenting a take on the Christmas classic that offers everything expected of the yearly tradition while making changes to reflect more modern values and themes.
Sacramento Ballet Artistic Director Amy Seiwert, who choreographed the company’s interpretation of the ballet for its first performance last year, approached the opportunity to choreograph The Nutcracker with deep knowledge of the show. Seiwert performed in two different versions in her 19-year career as a dancer.
“It was very important for me to add my own voice to the canon and not just mix up (previous versions),” Seiwert said.
…
Seiwert is one of the most prominent female ballet directors and choreographers in the nation. As she points out, there aren’t many to begin with.
Her production of The Nutcracker was the only full-length world premiere created by a woman for the 2018-2019 season in the country, according to the Dance Data Project.
“There is a serious lack of women creating ballet,” Seiwert said. “There’s starting to be a shift in that dynamic. I don’t think it’s because women can’t choreograph ballet, it usually has to do with opportunity.”
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Read the article in The Financial Times, which highlights the prioritization of female choreographers in Cannes this year (as in 2017).
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Chances are that by now, both Tchaikovsky’s beautiful music and the story of little Clara and her magical journey to the Land of the Sweets are quite familiar.
But there are some things you may not know about the Dayton Ballet’s production of “The Nutcracker” that’s slated for 10 upcoming performances at the Schuster Center from Friday, Dec. 13 through Monday, Dec. 23.
Accompanied by the full Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Neal Gittleman, the cast will include dancers from Dayton Ballet II and the Dayton Ballet School as well as 100 children from 30 different schools throughout our area. The Ballet’s artistic director Karen Russo Burke is the choreographer.
A female nutcracker?
For the first time in its history, the Dayton Ballet has cast a professional female dancer in the role of the Nutcracker. The company’s Miranda Dafoe will be sharing the role with a male dancer who will perform in the alternative cast. “She will represent the strength and dedication of our female military soldiers,” Burke says.
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For dance, 2019 was a year of transition. New leaders were installed at Chicago Dancers United, Links Hall and the Auditorium Theatre. The Joffrey Ballet kicked off its final season at the Auditorium, its performance home for decades, and is preparing to move to the Lyric Opera House next fall. Since last year’s Top-10, three pioneers of Chicago dance have died: founding Hubbard Street Dance Chicago dancer Claire Bataille, founding artistic director of Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater Dame Libby Komaiko and Christine DuBoulay Ellis, who ran the prestigious Ellis DuBoulay School of Ballet for more than 40 years with her husband, Richard Ellis. In some ways, it’s felt like a year of great loss, but transitions make way for new growth, new voices and new ideas.
And even amidst all these organizational changes, the year produced some extraordinary dance. Looking down this list, one can’t help but notice a banner year for the Harris Theater, which in addition to the shows listed chronologically below, also gave us the Chicago premiere of one of Australia’s finest dance companies, Bangarra Dance Theatre, and “Echo Mine,” Robyn Mineko Williams’ gorgeous eulogy for Claire Bataille. With CEO Patricia Barretto at the helm, the Harris Theater has truly found its footing as a world-class presenter of music and dance from around the world, and a champion for many of Chicago’s home team companies.
Ragamala Dance at the Harris Theater: Inspired, in part, by the ancient Indian board game Paramapadam, the dancers in “Written in Water” carved captivating patterns in bharatanatyam steps, mirrored by rich projections of a “game board” onto the stage. At the crux of the game: a moral dilemma in which players must choose between good and evil. But you needn’t have gotten any of that to be amazed by this work’s exquisite tableaux and glorious score, an ingenious, hybridized fusion of Sufi and Carnatic music, played live.
DDP Founder & President Liza Yntema is an underwriter of “Written in Water.”
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