Business World: Petition against BP’s new artistic director finds support

NEWS that a Russian will become the new artistic director of Ballet Philippines (BP), replacing National Artist Alice Reyes after her term ends in March, has sparked a social media uproar in cultural circles, inspiring a Change.org petition and a demand that the appointment be rescinded.

“We the Ballet Philippines community, dance artists, alumni, and artistic team, are united in the belief that Ballet Philippines is Filipino, for the Filipinos, and by Filipinos,” declares a statement addressed “To the Ballet Philippines Foundation, Inc. Board of Trustees,” which has been spread through social media with the hashtag #WeAreBalletPhilippines.

“We call on the Board to revoke the appointment of the foreign national Mr. Mikhail Martynyuk as Artistic Director,” it continues.

There is also a Change.org petition asking the BP Board to “to rescind or revise the contract offered to a Russian artist from a position as Artistic Director to another honored artist position in Ballet Philippines and to keep the position of Artistic Director Filipino.” It has garnered 2,558 signatures as of posting.

Read the full article online here.

By Alex Marshall

20 February 2020

Some of the dance world’s biggest names threatened to withdraw work from the repertoire of the Lyon Opera Ballet — a major French company — this week unless it reinstated its former artistic director.

“This is with a heavy heart,” they wrote in an open letter published in Libération, a major newspaper in France. But, they added, they saw “no other solutions.”

Yorgos Loukos, the Lyon company’s artistic director since 1991, was fired this month after a French court found him guilty of discriminating against a dancer. Mr. Loukos had refused to give the dancer a contract when she returned from maternity leave.

The Lyon Opera Ballet’s decision to fire him was “incomprehensible and arbitrary,” said the letter, which called on the French government to intervene.

The letter — in which stars appeared to hold a company to ransom — contained the signatures of around 100 people, including Benjamin Millepied, William Forsythe, and the European choreographers Jiri Kylian and Mats Ek. Sylvie Guillem, the French ballet star who retired in 2015, was listed as a signatory, as was the actress Isabelle Huppert.

But when The New York Times contacted some of the letter’s signees for comment, several disavowed it.

“I was asked to sign, but declined, because the letter spoke to internal matters of the theater of which I have no direct experience or knowledge, and I do not agree with the coercive tactics,” Mr. Forsythe said in an email.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

By Ashley Fetters, J. Clara Chan, and Nicholas Wu

Sarah Hubbard knew something was off about her interactions with a piano professor at the Berklee College of Music—they had a “haunting and unsettling” quality, she remembers. Hubbard, who studied violin at Berklee until she graduated in 2016, remembers that sometimes when they crossed paths, he seemed to be “deliberately trying to prolong” their interaction, and sometimes the professor, Bruce Thomas, gave her hugs that felt awkward. Sometimes he would show up near where she was, Hubbard says, lingering just at the periphery of her vision and then emailing her that he’d seen her that day but she’d seemed too busy to say hello. He sent her emails late at night, she says, and once when she didn’t respond promptly, he approached her boyfriend on campus to tell him to tell Hubbard to return his email. (Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.)

Hubbard frequently worried, as she moved around campus, about surprise encounters with Thomas, who had been teaching at the school for some three decades and occasionally composed music that her student ensemble played. When they were in the same music-department building at the same time, she’d plan escape routes: “Well, I at least can outrun this guy on stairs if I run into him; I can zoom past him. But I can’t do anything in an elevator,” she remembers thinking.

It got to the point where Hubbard had trouble focusing on her music—the reason why she’d come to Berklee in the first place. But she worried that things could “blow up in [her] face” if she reported his actions to Berklee’s leadership. “A lot of these encounters, they scream inappropriate, but they don’t scream, like, You’ve broken a rule in our handbook,” Hubbard says. So instead, she mentioned her discomfort to a faculty member she trusted, one of her student ensemble’s advisers, who she believes spoke to Thomas on her behalf—and quietly discouraged Hubbard from auditioning for any solos that, should she be assigned them, would require her to rehearse one-on-one with him.

Still, he always seemed to be close by, and Hubbard says he once cornered her in an elevator, demanding that she apologize for speaking up about his behavior.

Read the full article here.

Agence France-Presse

PARIS- The director of a French ballet has been sacked for firing a dancer after she had a baby, the French culture ministry confirmed last Friday.

The unions had called for Greek-born Yorgos Loukos to go after he lost his appeal over discrimination against dancer Karline Marion, who was 34 at the time.

He was ordered to pay Marion €5,000 (S$7,600) in compensation.

Loukos, 69, who had been director of the Lyon Ballet for 33 years, was fired last Thursday.

Like the vast majority of ballerinas in France, Marion was on a temporary contract during her five years at the ballet.

Read the full story here.

29 September 2019

It was at the end of an in-house Studio Sessions showing of contemporary works by full time students that Michael Pappalardo announced the immediate closure of Melbourne City Ballet. It was the evening of June 27. Four days earlier, company members had received an email stating that activities would be suspended for 14 days. This was the first they had heard that the company was in peril. By the next morning, MCB was no more. The company’s wonderful purpose-fitted studios in Melbourne’s Pentridge precinct in Coburg bore a ‘breach of lease’ notice. The company was debarred from entering the premises. It was all over.

In the following days there was an outpouring of sadness and sympathy for Melbourne City Ballet. Dance Australia’s Karen van Ulzen broke the story with an interview with Artistic Director Michael Pappalardo who cited lack of funding as a key factor in the company’s sudden closure after five years’ operation. The magazine’s social media pages were blitzed with messages of support and appreciation as well as disgust at the government’s refusal to adequately support the small- to medium-sized arts community. People cared about the fate of this company.

Dance Australia, like other individuals and organisations, had been a great supporter of MCB. We started attending and reviewing performances from the outset. It was wonderful to have a local company bringing dance to audiences that might not be able to access the very prohibitively expensive professional offerings of the likes of The Australian Ballet. Better yet, as Pappalardo proudly announced, the company provided jobs for dancers.

Read the full article in Dance Australia.