BalletX: Sneakpeek of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s ‘The Little Prince’
Watch a sneak peek of BalletX’s newest commission: The Little Prince. The work will be full-length – one of very few by women this season.
Courtesy of BalletX.
April 1st: Palm Desert Choreography Festival, April 1st: UNCSA Choreographic Institute Residency, 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
×Watch a sneak peek of BalletX’s newest commission: The Little Prince. The work will be full-length – one of very few by women this season.
Courtesy of BalletX.
By Laura Joffre
16 June 2019
We are used to seeing Birmingham Royal Ballet in traditional classical productions, in which they always excel. But this mixed bill sees the company in a more contemporary mode, experimenting with distinctive styles in pieces by three female choreographers.
Jessica Lang’s Lyric Pieces, created for the company in 2012, illustrates Edvard Grieg’s piano suites with pure classical ballet. It is not the most innovative work, but harmonious ensembles and flawless dancing, particularly from elegant Yvette Knight and sharp and precise Maureya Lebowitz, raise the overall effect.
Read the full review in The Guardian.
14 June 2019
Men unable to change diapers; women cleaning while men kick their feet up on the couch; women having trouble with parking: Scenes like these, which play on gender stereotypes, are now banned in British advertisements. Britain’s advertising regulator announced the changes in December, but companies were given a six-month adjustment period before they took effect.
The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority said in a statement that it will also ban ads that connect physical features with success in the romantic or social spheres; assign stereotypical personality traits to boys and girls, such as bravery for boys and tenderness for girls; suggest that new mothers should prioritize their looks or home cleanliness over their emotional health; and mock men for being bad at stereotypically “feminine” tasks, such as vacuuming, washing clothes or parenting.
The guidelines were developed after a report from the regulator found that gender-stereotypical imagery and rhetoric “can lead to unequal gender outcomes in public and private aspects of people’s lives.” The report came on the heels of a few British ads that perpetuated negative assumptions about women, including one for Protein World, a weight-loss drink, which paired a bikini-clad model with the question: “Are you beach body ready?” The posters inspired a Change.org petition with more than 70,000 signatures demanding the removal of the ads.
Read the full article in The New York Times.
By Bri Kovan
17 June 2019
Last Sunday night, Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin’s acceptance speech set the internet ablaze with a call-to-arms about diversity on Broadway, asking theater producers (and their counterparts in other industries) to hire artists of color and women artists. “It’s not a pipeline issue,” said Chavkin, who was the only woman to direct a Broadway musical this season. “It’s a failure of imagination.” On stage, Chavkin championed Hadestown, which uses the mythological love stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and Persephone as vehicles to discuss workers’ rights, climate change, and authoritarian leadership. (To dive into the show’s folksy New Orleans milieu, check out Hadestown‘s performance from the 73rd Annual Tony Awards, starring Reeve Carney.) The show won eight of its 14 nominations at the Tonys, including best musical, best director, and best original score for singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. It’s the first musical by an all-female principal team to win best musical.
Next up, the Maryland native dives into her next set of projects: Lempicka, a feminist paean to the midcentury Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka, living in Paris between world wars; Annie Salem, an adaptation of Mac Wellman’s 1996 novel, which uses science fiction to understand racism in the post-industrial Rust Belt; and Moby-Dick, her next collaboration with Dave Malloy (of 2017’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, for which Chavkin earned her first Tony nod). “We’re trying to use the ‘great American novel’ to wrestle with twenty-first century America,” she says. “It deals with white supremacy—the whiteness of the whale takes on loaded significance in this adaptation—but also climate change. What’s our relationship to nature as hunters, consumers of nature?”
Read the full article on elle.com
By Lauren Warnecke
15 June 2019
Perhaps I’ll start at the end. In the post-performance Q&A for “The Internal Geometry,” a world premiere by Natya Dance Theatre at Links Hall, artistic director Hema Rajagopalan spoke about the origins of Bharatanatyam. The traditional South Indian dance began in the temples as an artistic language imparted by the gods to communicate the scriptures though rhythm, expression and drama. It’s a tradition spanning 3,000 years, often used to depict stories steeped in Hindu mythology and part of many children’s cultural and spiritual upbringing.
It is a relatively new development that Bharatanatyam is performed in concert dance venues. And while Western audiences generally get that dance can be equally entertaining and enlightening, this is often less true about dance forms whose cultural origins lie outside the French courts.
So, while audience members (like this critic) unfamiliar with Hindu mythology or the meanings of each hand gesture or shift of the eyes in Bharatanatyam might be there to simply soak in the intoxicating physicality and mesmerizing rhythms of this extraordinary dance form, Rajagopalan reminded us that the goal isn’t entertainment, but “Rasa,” the spiritual enlightenment of the viewer and a deeper connectivity to the gods.
This is perhaps why transitions between the vignettes of “The Internal Geometry” are narrated on a gargled microphone from Rajagopalan’s perch in Links Hall’s light booth, and indeed, Natya often includes English translations or explanations of the stories to appeal to a wide audience. “The Internal Geometry” is a pared-down presentation, with recorded music and a few simple light cues, uncharacteristic for Natya, but typical of most things in Links Hall’s white box theater. Even the dancers were just a bit less adorned than usual, “The Internal Geometry’s” six women wearing relatively simple traditional costumes with characteristic make-up and ankle bells, plus a few personalized necklaces and bracelets.
Read the full article in The Chicago Tribune.
By Caelainn Barr and Frances Perraudin
28 February 2019
Inaccurate figures and a lack of sanctions risk making a “mockery” of the gender pay gap reporting system, critics have warned following an in-depth Guardian analysis of submissions.
Amid concerns that a lack of transparency and inaccurate reporting is undermining efforts to address pay inequality, mathematically impossible gender pay gap data filed by companies for last year has yet to be corrected.
And with less than a month to go before this year’s reporting deadline, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) admitted that, despite those errors, no companies have yet been fined for failing to comply with legislation.
The deadline for companies to report their gender pay gap figures for 2018 is 30 March for public bodies and 4 April for private companies.
However, more than 30 companies are yet to file accurate data for the previous 2017 period with the Equalities Office, and a number have filed mathematically impossible figures this year. Analysis also shows a further 725 companies have filed or resubmitted their figures since last year’s deadline.
The shadow secretary for women and equalities, Dawn Butler, said: “Gender pay gap reporting was meant to provide transparency, but the fact that companies have given inaccurate data and faced no sanctions makes a mockery of the whole system.”
Read the full article in The Guardian.
By Jim Waterson
22 May 2019
A BBC manager has publicly turned down a promotion after finding out she had been offered £12,000 less than a man doing the same job, threatening legal action against the broadcaster and suggesting the corporation is still struggling with equal pay.
Karen Martin emailed hundreds of BBC staff to announce she would no longer be taking up her role as one of the two deputy editors in the BBC’s radio newsroom, which produces material for broadcast to hundreds of millions of people on both UK radio stations and the World Service.
The experienced radio producer’s new job, in which she would oversee global radio news output, had been announced in February. But Martin said she could not accept the role after discovering the other newly appointed deputy editor, Roger Sawyer, had been offered a substantially higher salary.
“Despite being awarded the same job, on the same day, after the same board, during the same recruitment process, BBC News asked me to accept a considerably lower salary than my male counterpart. A lot less,” she wrote in the email sent to all BBC radio newsroom staff.
“I’ve been assured our roles and responsibilities are the same. I’ve also been told my appointment was ‘very well deserved’. It’s just that I’m worth £12,000 less. Over the past four months I have asked BBC News to think again. And they’ve inched their offer up by addressing historical ‘under payments’. Now the gap is nearer to £7,000. But for me it has never been about the actual salary. It has been about equal pay.”
Read the full article in The Guardian.
By Judith Mackrell
16 July 2018
Ballet companies are unique in ways that are wonderful and preposterous. At best, they are fabulously creative organisations to which loyal dancers, including the biggest stars, may devote entire careers. But, with scores of dancers striving to master extreme levels of physical perfection, pitted against each other for prime roles and principal rankings, they can also be hotbeds of competitive dissatisfaction. That intensity is exacerbated by the fact that presiding over these very young, driven, vulnerable egos is one person – the artistic director – who holds their destinies in his, and occasionally her, hands.
“Dancers today are not ‘behaving badly’, they are asking more of us as leaders,” wrote Scottish Ballet’s Christopher Hampson earlier this year. He was asking fellow artistic directors to reform their practices in the wake of accusations by ballet dancers around the world of bullying, aggression and misconduct. There have been complaints from dancers at leading companies – among them New York City Ballet, English National Ballet, Paris Opera and Finnish National Ballet – and some allegations have been extremely disturbing.
But what prompted Hampson was not so much specific cases as the conviction that such behaviour would continue to occur as long as certain assumptions within ballet culture have remained unchallenged. “I genuinely believe that every artistic director in the UK is trying to do their best by their dancers, but we all have a way to go,” he says. “We have a problem that we need to admit to, and it can be difficult to talk about because it can involve people in the past who we’ve held in such veneration.”
Read the full article in The Guardian.
By Lyndsey Winship
5 April 2019
In 2016, English National Ballet director Tamara Rojo took a stand with She Said, a programme of all-female choreographers. She Persisted reassures us that Rojo is serious about showcasing women’s work, and it appears in a landscape that already shows signs of cultural shift.
This time there’s only one new work, by Stina Quagebeur, a dancer Rojo is nurturing from within ENB’s ranks. Nora is a stripped-back version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, intended to illustrate the eponymous heroine’s emotional journey. It gets caught up tussling with the plot over Nora’s loan (various bits of paper passed back and forth) but as Nora, Crystal Costa morphs from blithe young woman to stifled, conflicted wife and finally to a woman of firm resolve, even if we don’t quite see why.
Quagebeur creates a distinct feel for the movement: urgent surging phrases, endless spooling circles. The speed is deftly handled by Costa and Jeffrey Cirio as her husband Torvald; he is a dancer of great finesse who never leaves a frayed edge. The whole piece is rather hampered by its score, Philip Glass’s Tirol Concerto, which so relentlessly implores us to feel something that it becomes meaningless. Nonetheless, Quagebeur has interesting ideas and – unlike her titular character – a clear sense of her own voice.
Alongside Nora is the return of Broken Wings, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida Kahlo ballet from the original She Said, slightly reworked. Katja Khaniukova brings spirit and sorrow to Kahlo, and, aside from a costume incorporating a stuffed monkey, the highs all come with the pas de deux, fully human and full of spark between Kahlo and philandering husband Diego Rivera (Irek Mukhamedov, playing him as a wild-eyed, soft-hearted old fool).
Read the full review in The Guardian.
By Lyndsey Winship
13 June 2019
A Peter and the Wolf where Peter is a girl, the animals dress in streetwear and the pastoral setting becomes an urban playground: this is the world according to Ruth Brill. The 30-year-old has just made her second main-stage work for Birmingham Royal Ballet, the company she has danced with since 2012, and is now retiring as a dancer to concentrate on choreography.
Brill’s work has a sense of fun, fantasy and solid classical grounding. Her last piece, Arcadia, had nymphs and gods cavorting in the woods. In Peter and the Wolf – Prokofiev’s much-loved children’s piece, narrated here by poet Hollie McNish – the duck may be a hormonal teen in headphones, and the dancers wearing a mix of pointe shoes and trainers, but the steps are still steeped in classical tradition, just with character-driven inflections, diversions and quirks.
Seeking to connect with her audience, Brill has made dance for the Rugby World Cup and Birmingham flash mobs. Her next projects include working with London Children’s Ballet, New English Ballet Theatre and National Youth Ballet. “Now is when my generation needs to step up and prepare to become the next wave of leaders,” Brill said recently. “We have different life experiences, different stories to tell. And it’s time to push ourselves forward to inherit roles from the generation before us.”
With her bleach-blond bob, Charlotte Edmonds looks the epitome of cool, and you could say the same about the 22-year-old’s dance. Plucked out of the Rambert school to become the Royal Ballet’s first Young Choreographer, Edmonds impressed everyone during a three-year association with Covent Garden, where she was mentored by Wayne McGregor, made choreography for Selfridges, a film for the National Gallery and a ballet with basketball that was inspired by the legendary choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.
Since going freelance, she’s made an underwater ballet about depression, featuring ballerina Francesca Hayward, and is keen to work more in digital platforms. She is doing post-production on a film she has directed about plastic pollution, is making a documentary series about dyslexia (a condition she has herself) and is working on a ballet about the climate crisis.
These might be serious subjects, but Edmonds is more and more drawn to fizzy, pop-culture-inspired choreography, closing the gap between the ballet stage and the dancefloor, such as a funky solo she made for the Royal Ballet’s Joseph Sissens and a new piece set to the music of Hot Chip.
Read the full list in The Guardian.