Joffrey Ballet Winning Works Brings In 2 Women and 2 Men Choreographers
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April 30th: South Arts: Professional Development & Artistic Planning Grants, April 30th: South Arts: Express Grants, May 6th: Doris Duke Foundation Grant, May 7th: South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, May 27th: Dancemakers Residency, June 1st: Miami DanceMakers
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By Lyndsey Winship
18 February 2020
Jacqueline du Pré danced with her cello. In concert footage, her body sighs and sways as her music soars. But it’s a leap from lyrical presence on the podium to transposing Du Pré’s tragically short life into dance, a challenge taken up by choreographer Cathy Marston in her first main stage commission for the Royal Ballet.
The Cellist comes in a double bill with Jerome Robbins’ 1969 Dances at a Gathering – Chopin piano, dreamy pastels, choreography of conversational nuance and lovely, subtle dancing – but it’s Marston’s ingenuity we’re all here to see. She is bold in having a dancer (Marcelino Sambé) embody the cello itself, kneeling in front of Du Pré (a radiant Lauren Cuthbertson), arm raised like the neck of the instrument as the cellist draws her hand across the air holding an invisible bow.
This picture spirals off into something more expansive, but they return to the motif. Mostly it seems to work, although there are cumbersome moments of pas de deux, not least due to the awkwardness of the cellist’s wide-legged stance. But there’s also the easy flow of bodies entwined, the way artist, instrument and music become one.
Composer Philip Feeney weaves extracts from Du Pré’s rep into his score and Marston has Du Pré and conductor Daniel Barenboim (Matthew Ball) fall in love on the concert stage, locking eyes over Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Aware of the music’s importance, Marston crowds the scene, with the imperious Ball dancing off the podium, an orchestra of dancers rising and falling and Cuthbertson changing from bright innocent girl to woman in love as we watch. It’s arguably an overload, although more generally the whirlwind of motion evokes exactly the giddy joy and genius shown in Christopher Nupen’s film The Trout, featuring Du Pré and Barenboim in their youthful prime.
Read the full review in The Guardian.
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.
By Lauren Warnecke
Remember that scene in the movie “Footloose?” The one where Kevin Bacon drives into a warehouse in his VW bug, pulls a cassette tape out of the glove box, drinks a beer and dances like heck? I don’t know if Justin Peck was thinking about Kevin Bacon when he made “The Times Are Racing” for the New York City Ballet — after all, he wasn’t even born when that movie came out — but Peck, NYCB’s resident choreographer, captured something similar to that pent-up anger that drove Bacon to dance.
“The Times Are Racing” saw its Joffrey premiere on a mixed-rep program of the same name, through Feb. 23 at the Auditorium Theatre.
Dancer Edson Barbosa bounded across the stage — airborne more frequently than his feet, shod with white high-top sneakers, were on the ground — in tank top and jeans, sweat flying from his brow. But unlike Kevin Bacon in that warehouse, Barbosa isn’t alone. “The Times Are Racing” isn’t about getting out personal frustration; rather, it’s about how a collective of people can band together to create change in the world.
“The Times Are Racing” opens with a single dancer huddled by the company. Barbosa’s solo becomes a tap-dance inspired duet with Greig Matthews. A stunning pas de deux for Jeraldine Mendoza and Dylan Gutierrez (who gives the best performance of his career) repeats pretzel-like intricacies, mimicking the cumulative rise in energy that builds within selections from Dan Deacon’s iterative electronic score called “America.”
Dancing in sneakers affords these dancers the freedom to execute Peck’s larger-than-life choreography with reckless abandon, jumping higher and reaching farther than they could in their ballet slippers. They’re dressed in street clothes which give off an early 1990s vibe (styled by Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony), but this is not a Gen X ballet. There’s an underbelly to “The Times Are Racing” that speaks directly to today’s deeply divided political landscape. That’s not to say millennials and Gen Z-ers are the only ones to experience political division. But Peck choreographed the piece during the 2016 presidential election — which is why it’s important to point out that this piece is actually not at all like “Footloose.” It’s not just virtuosic; it’s deeply personal to those dancers on stage. Of course, no Peck ballet is without commitment to technique and form, so any sense of cacophony is tempered by clean, crisp lighting by Peck’s frequent collaborator Brandon Sterling Baker, tightly organized formations and a blending of grounded pedestrianism from the waist down with perfectly balletic upper bodies.
Read the full review online here.
A young woman struggling with an eating disorder tries to shift from self-loathing to self-loving.
By Lauren Covalucci
I always liked myself better for what I could be than for what I was — especially when it came to my body.
This started at age 3 in dance class, where the other girls, unlike me, had thin arms and legs. The other girls’ tights, unlike mine, didn’t dig into their waists like a pink belt around teddy bear fluff. Their cheeks didn’t glow red after class. They could do splits.
By the time I was 13, my body had stretched and thinned, leading my teacher to say, “You finally look like a dancer.” Ten years of childhood passion couldn’t get me there, but puberty did.
Nine years later, once puberty had run its course, I learned that I could accomplish a similarly magical transformation by simply not eating.
Thinking back on that time now feels like waking from a nightmare: bolting upright at 4 a.m., blinking and breathing as you try to reorient yourself to reality and reconcile the things you did in dreams with the person you are awake. This is how I give context to memories like the time, nearly five years ago, when I started a loud public fight with my college boyfriend because he had bought me a slice of pizza on a Saturday night.
My argument went like this: “I said I didn’t want a slice of pizza. I can’t just not eat pizza if I don’t want it. It’s not that easy. You never listen to me. You don’t even respect me enough not to buy me a slice of pizza. When I say no, I mean no.”
Yes, that’s really what I said.
I can’t explain to him what happened because we don’t speak anymore. The breakup was unsurprisingly messy, borne of our emotional mismatch — his optimism (“Can’t you just be happy?”) versus my depression (“That’s not how it works.”). One night, as our hurtful exchanges snowballed, he went for the jugular: “You’ve gained weight.”
Love may feel intolerably complex at 22, but one emotional equation, for me, was starkly simple: skinny + pretty = good.
Read the rest of the story here.
By Chava Lansky
Wonder what’s going on in ballet this week? We’ve rounded up some highlights.
In 2016, prolific choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa created Broken Wings for English National Ballet, a short piece diving into the life of iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Soon after, Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen offered her the chance to expand that work into a full-length ballet. The result, simply titled Frida, makes its premiere February 6-25 in Amsterdam.
In collaboration with British composer Peter Salem and Dutch designer Dieuweke van Reij, Ochoa’s ballet explores Kahlo’s fraught relationship with artist Diego Rivera, her bisexuality, the physical and emotional pain she endured and the way that she crafted her own image through her paintings. Dutch National Ballet has put out a series of YouTube videos exploring the creation of the piece; catch the first one above.
Atlanta Ballet celebrates the rhythms and energy of jazz music this week in Heart/Beat: Gospel, Brubeck & Rhythms of the City, a triple bill of company premieres. The program, running February 7-15, includes Lar Lubovitch’s Elemental Brubeck to the music of Dave Brubeck, Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet to compositions by Mikael Karlsson and Victor Feldman, and Dwight Rhoden’s Sunrise Divine to an original score by Kevin Johnson.
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.
By Laura Bradley
When Flint Town director Jessica Dimmock first decided to urge the Directors Guild of America to change its parental leave policies, one dim worry crept into the back of her mind: What if she was starting this battle only for herself? What if she was the only person who had lost health insurance because having a baby made it impossible for her to meet the minimum income requirement to stay on the plan? “In my gut I knew this wasn’t going to be the case,” Dimmock told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “But there was a slight moment where I was like, ‘Huh, maybe this doesn’t happen to people and I’m just super inefficient, or…’ I don’t know.”
Once the campaign launched, however, a flood of responses confirmed Dimmock was not alone in this frustration—not remotely. “And they weren’t just the DGA,” Dimmock said. “They were also from the Writers Guild, they were also from producers, they were also from people that are part of [the Screen Actors Guild].”
For coverage under the DGA’s health insurance—a separate entity called the DGA-Producer Health Plan, which is jointly administered by the guild and producer associations representing the film, TV, and commercial production industries—members must surpass a minimum income threshold from directing guild projects within a 12-month period. Having a baby complicates that task for obvious reasons—and as a result, after Dimmock gave birth in 2017, she lost her guild insurance. She switched to COBRA, which carries higher premiums, at a time when she needed to visit the doctor more often than ever. Dimmock’s directing partner, the baby’s father, lost his insurance for a quarter but, she noticed, was also not as intensely impacted overall.
And so last summer, once Dimmock was back on her feet and directing once more, she decided to explore what she might do. By December, she had gathered dozens of signatures on a letter calling for new parents to be granted extensions to the time period required to meet their minimums, which she presented to the Eastern Council Board. The proposition extends to all new parents, including those who have adopted.
“They were receptive and they said, ‘We’d like to explore this,’” Dimmock said of the council’s reaction, “but there was nothing else that happened.” Dimmock took her campaign public in January ahead of the DGA’s national board meeting in the hopes of keeping the pressure on. But that gathering came and went. The path forward at this point is unclear; she has received no next-steps.
Read the full article here.
11 February 2020
Boston Ballet Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen announces programming for the 2020-2021 season. The season opens with a world premiere as part of a three-ballet program of William Forsythe‘s works. Nissinen’s The Nutcracker returns to capture the imagination of audiences of all ages. The spring season includes a second world premiere by William Forsythe, Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony No. 9, and George Balanchine‘s Ballo della Regina, plus the Company premiere of Christopher Wheeldon‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the return of Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty. The season concludes with a female-led program, part of Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER Initiative. The Company’s 57th season runs November 5, 2020 through May 30, 2021 at the Citizens Bank Opera House.
“Our upcoming season is a dream come true with many new works by today’s greatest living choreographers paired with beloved classics,” said Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen.
The season opens with Triple Bill (November 5-15), featuring three works by creative powerhouse and internationally-acclaimed choreographer William “Bill” Forsythe. Just prior to the season opening, Boston Ballet will return to New York City to present this program at The Shed in October, which features a world premiere by Forsythe, co-commissioned by The Shed and Boston Ballet. Blake Works I returns by popular demand, transforming James Blake‘s “The Colour in Anything” into “sheer joy” (The New York Times). The international sensation Playlist (EP) returns after a record-breaking world premiere in Boston in March 2019 followed by the Company’s successful Paris debut in June. Playlist (EP) pulls pop and R&B music from Forsythe’s personal playlist to fuel the piece’s “high-kicking exuberance” (The Boston Globe). The program continues Forsythe and Boston Ballet’s long-term partnership formed in 2016.
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The final program of the season is ChoreograpHER (May 20-30). The female-led program celebrates innovative voices across the art world with four new works. Dutch choreographer Nanine Linning will create her first work for a major ballet company in North America, pairing vivid imagery with strong physical movement. New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Tiler Peck will create a world premiere. She recently received accolades for her work at Vail International Dance Festival and directed movement for the film John Wick 3: Parabellum. Choreographer and Norwegian National Ballet Principal Dancer Melissa Hough, formerly a Boston Ballet Principal Dancer, returns to create a world premiere on the company where she got her start. Visual artist Shantell Martin-internationally-acclaimed for her landscape of lines and existential questions-will create a work in collaboration with Boston Ballet Principal Dancer and choreographer Lia Cirio. The program will also feature conceptual art by writer, researcher, and artist Emma McCormick-Goodhart. This program is part of Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER Initiative, a multi-year commitment in support of emerging female choreographers. It was established in 2018 to give female dance students and professional dancers an opportunity to develop choreographic skills.
Read the full article on Broadway World.
10 February 2020
Dubbed “a Nashville miracle” by the New York Times, Tennessee’s premiere ballet company returns for the 2020-2021 season with a spectacular repertoire of fantastic favorites and electrifying new works. With a continued commitment to presenting powerful and transformative art, Nashville Ballet’s next season is meant to uplift, inspire, and engage audiences with impeccable storytelling, athleticism, and artistry.
Season highlights include the return of Vasterling’s celebrated blockbuster adaptation of Peter Pan, a reimagined and expanded take on the gothic tale of Dracula, and a series of works created exclusively by female choreographers and composers. Additionally, the season will feature a choreographic workshop offering audiences a first look at Vasterling’s next major project, new additions to the holiday classic, Nashville’s Nutcracker, and much more.
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February 12-14, 2021
TPAC’s Polk Theater
Orange choreography by Gabrielle Lamb
Music composed by Caleb Burhans
NEW! Choreography by Mollie Sansone
Music composed by Larissa Maestro
Live music performed by Lockeland Strings
NEW! Choreography by Suzanne Haag
Music composed by Fanny Mendelssohn
Superstitions choreography by Jennifer Archibald
Music composed by Cristina Spinei
This popular series known for unique musical collaborations and shedding light on important cultural themes brings female perspectives to the forefront this season with a production featuring new works exclusively from women!
Read the full article on Broadway World.