The Merce Cunningham Company: dancing right up to the end

 dance  No Responses »
Dec 272011
 

It has been an exten­ded and unpre­ced­en­ted count­down for the dan­cers and staff of the Merce Cun­ning­ham Dance Com­pany, said the Los Angeles Times. Never before has a modern-dance troupe planned for its own demise. But then Cun­ning­ham, one of the sin­gu­lar innov­at­ors in his field, who remained forward-looking and boldly cre­at­ive until his 2009 death at age 90 — was always tak­ing the lead, pion­eer­ing invent­ive, unex­pec­ted approaches.

The intens­ive two-year world tour cul­min­ates this week with six Events at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory.

The per­form­ances were planned by Cun­ning­ham as a global cel­eb­ra­tion and farewell. The armory, with its 55,000-square-foot drill hall, was his choice for his company’s final per­form­ance in its home city, and he stip­u­lated the $10 ticket price. The dan­cing will unfold on three stages and, true to form, will fea­ture newly com­mis­sioned music and ori­ginal décor by Daniel Arsham.

These two years seemed like a gift. But now that we’re in the last stretch, there’s con­stant adren­aline — we’re tired but so excited. About two months ago we star­ted say­ing good­bye to theat­ers, people. Dur­ing the past week, we’ve done four pieces for the last time. It hasn’t quite hit me yet, that it’s the last time dan­cing them.”

said , a mem­ber of the com­pany of 14 dan­cers for nearly eight years.

The company’s final per­form­ance on New Year’s Eve will mark the end of a rad­ical and vis­ion­ary era in dance — and open up an unfore­seen future for the Cun­ning­ham tech­nique and rep­er­tory, and for the dan­cers themselves. Weber, who has plans to teach and hopes to con­tinue per­form­ing, said:

After doing Merce’s work it’s going to be import­ant to still have chal­lenges. I think we’re all drawn to that some­how. The work says it all. I’m intrigued to see what I can find, what will happen.”

via  latimes.com
Photo by Floor [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wiki­me­dia Commons

Darcey Bussell on Astaire, Fonteyn and Michael Jackson

 ballet, cinema, dance  No Responses »
Dec 222011
 

On Christ­mas Day the BBC2 will trans­mit  Dances Hol­ly­wood, a trib­ute to the great film music­als. Bus­sell talked to the Radio Times’ Alexia Skinitis about the dan­cers who have inspired her:

Fred Astaire

As a little girl, I didn’t dream of being a dan­cer, I dreamt of being a movie star like Ginger Rogers and dan­cing with Fred Astaire. I used to watch the Sunday double-bills on TV and Iong to be part of what seemed a per­fect Dis­ney­land world. Astaire was a genius.

Cheek to Cheek from Top Hat was his iconic dance with Ginger Rogers and it was such a joy re-creating it — although dan­cing in heels was very hard for me. He made everything look so easy, but trust me, it is not!

He had a unique style and iden­tity on stage and brought his own per­son­al­ity to everything he did, which is an amaz­ing qual­ity that has inspired every dan­cer who fol­lowed him.… con­tinue reading

Baryshnikov, Ratmansky, Sutton Foster & Jenifer Ringer head the line-up for the 54th Annual Dance Magazine Awards

 awards, ballet, dance  No Responses »
Nov 212011
 

Mikhail Bary­sh­nikov, Tony Award-winning Any­thing Goes star Sut­ton Foster, New York City prin­cipal Jenifer Ringer and cho­reo­grapher Alexei Rat­mansky are among the dance per­son­al­it­ies tak­ing part at Manhattan’s Ailey Cit­ig­roup Theater on Decem­ber 5 for the Dance Magazine Awards.

Bary­sh­nikov presents the award to pion­eer­ing “dance healer” Dr. Wil­liam Hamilton, while Foster will honou her Any­thing Goes director/choreographer, Tony Award win­ner Kath­leen Mar­shall. Present­ing to Ringer is her hus­band and former NYCB dance part­ner James Fay­ette, now a rep­res­ent­at­ive for Amer­ican Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA).

Post­mod­ern cho­reo­grapher Yvonne Rainer rounds out the evening’s glit­ter­ing honorees. John Mee­han, a former prin­cipal dan­cer at ABT and cur­rent fac­ulty at Vas­sar, and cho­reo­grapher Sally Sil­vers com­plete the lineup of presenters.

In addi­tion to the present­a­tions, the even­ing includes an excerpt of Ratmansky’s Rus­sian Sea­sons, per­formed by Jen­nie Somogyi, Amar Ramasar, Jonathan Stafford, and Sean Suozzi of NYCB. Films of work by both Mar­shall and Rainer will also be shown.… con­tinue reading

Doing arabesques on your husband’s head maybe a strange way to keep a marriage alive. Wei and Wu know otherwise…

 ballet, dance  No Responses »
Nov 022011
 

of China’s Swan Lake,  premiered in 2005, has been delight­ing You­Tubers for years, and more recently the com­pany star­ted tour­ing its ver­sion even to import­ant bal­let centres. The performance’s fusion of dance and stunts has given the com­pany global recognition.

The concept of infus­ing acro­bat­ics into the per­form­ance of Tchaikovsky’s mas­ter­piece was born when two troupe mem­bers — and his wife, — cre­ated “Ori­ental Swan Bal­let” when she bal­ances in pointe in her husband’s head.

Bal­let came to China 45 years ago and is viewed as a high-class art form. Acrobatics are a Chinese tradition, dating back to the West­ern Han Dyn­asty (206 BC-AD 24), strug­gling to sur­vive mar­ket competition. It seemed a risky ven­ture to inter­mingle the two art forms, but doing so zapped new life into both, says Zhao Ming, the production’s cho­reo­grapher and dir­ector. Ming stud­ied mod­ern dance in New York in 1984 and was a Hong Kong Bal­let principal dancer from 1993 to 1995.

He spoke to The China Daily:

Acrobats tra­di­tion­ally study stunts, but they must also learn act­ing and dan­cing for this Swan Lake. The hard part for me and the per­formers is to ful­fil the goals set by Tchaikovsky’s music. Everything must come from the music, which is the most important part of the show.”

Zhao cred­its the show’s inter­na­tional acclaim to the tal­ent of Wei and Wu, who have been train­ing new couples to per­form their roles.

The Swan Princess, Yu Wanqing, and her prince, Chen Dong, epitomize the uncon­ven­tion­al­mar­riage of clas­sical bal­let and tra­di­tional Chinese acro­bat­ics in their performances. The rehearsal room falls silent when Yu balances on her partner’s head with her legs extended invertical splits.

19-year-old baller­ina Liu Jie spe­cial­izes in the “Bal­let On Top of the Head” pro­gramme series created following Swan Lake’s success.

The trainer said I was a good baller­ina but needed to start from scratch to learn acro­bat­ics. That was really hard.”

She says hand­stands were par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult for her, as she was accus­tomed to dan­cing on her feet! She recalls feel­ing ecstatic when she became able to whirl on her partner’s shoulders and head without safety ropes in 2008.

Wu and Wei were child athletes, who also under­went the chal­len­ging trans­ition to acro­bat­ics when they joined the Guang­dong Troupe. Wu says,

A sim­ilar phys­ical elasti­city is required of both acrobats and dan­cers. But each skill pushes the other to greater heights when combined. Ballet acquires higher levels of con­trol, while acrobatics take on enhanced gracefulness, musicality and expressiveness.”

… con­tinue reading

Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty — from Petipa to iPads

 ballet, dance  2 Responses »
Oct 262011
 

is to cre­ate a new ver­sion of with “vam­piric influences”.

The work will be premiered at Christ­mas as part of a sea­son at Sadler’s Wells mark­ing 25 years of Bourne’s com­pany, New Adventures. Earlier works, includ­ing Nutcracker and , will also be show­cased at the Lon­don venue in 2012.

Perrault’s time­less fairy tale, about a young girl cursed to sleep for one hun­dred years, was turned into a legendary bal­let by cho­reo­grapher, Marius Petipa, in 1890. Bourne takes this as his start­ing point, set­ting the Christen­ing of , the story’s heroine, in the year of the ballet’s first per­form­ance; the height of the Fin-de-Siecle period when fair­ies, vam­pires and dec­ad­ent opu­lence fed the gothic imagination.

As Aurora grows into a young woman, we move for­wards in time to the more rigid, uptight Edwar­d­ian era; a myth­ical golden age of long sum­mer after­noons, cro­quet on the lawn and new dance crazes.… con­tinue reading

When the critics can stand it no longer: jukebox musicals and waggling penises

 ballet, dance, music, musical theatre, theatre  No Responses »
Oct 252011
 

Everyone’s been excitedly writ­ing about the rush to the exits dur­ing the cur­rent revival of ’s . The Royal Shakespeare Com­pany say that about 30 people a per­form­ance are leav­ing, dis­gus­ted with scenes of tor­ture and sim­u­lated sod­omy with a sex toy.

The Guard­ian asked their crit­ics about when they could stand it no longer and had to head for the pave­ment. Crit­ics are, in the­ory, are required to sit through to the bit­ter end, but we’re all human. Here are a couple of extracts:

, pop

When I’m a pay­ing punter, I’m very much in favour of walk­ing out of some­thing you’re not enjoy­ing. Some­times, in the early hours, I wake up with a jolt and real­ise that I’ve been dream­ing about the awful night I sat through the insult­ingly shoddy Queen musical We Will Rock You to the bit­ter end. I wanted to storm the exits the moment it became appar­ent the lead char­ac­ter was called .… con­tinue reading

Leslie Caron’s six best musical stars: from Streisand and Garland to Astaire and Travolta

 ballet, cinema, dance, music  No Responses »
Oct 222011
 

is in Lon­don as An Amer­ican in Paris is about to be in the cinemas once again. She talked to The Times:

When I first arrived in Hol­ly­wood I had never seen a musical. I was only 18. Until then I had been a premier dan­cer in the Bal­lets des Champs-Élysées, in Paris. Then, one day, a friend told me that someone called Gene Kelly had seen me dance and wanted me to do a screen test for a film he was plan­ning, An Amer­ican in Paris.

I’d never done that kind of dan­cing, but my friend said Gene thought he could teach me. So I met Gene, did the test, then for­got all about it. Within two weeks I received a phone call say­ing, “You’ve been chosen”.

Here are the six musical stars that Caron prefers to watch:

Bar­bra Streis­and
She is the greatest singer who ever did the movies, and a remark­able act­ress.… con­tinue reading

Pippo Delbono, Marie-Agnès Gillot and Bobò — the étoile in the asylum

 ballet, dance, music, theatre  3 Responses »
Oct 222011
 

In just under two hours takes his audi­ence on a roller­coaster ride from Dante to Pasolini, from a solo violin to a Verdi chorus, from con­tem­por­ary dance to pointe shoes, from the eleg­ance of an opera crowd to the squalor of an asylum. And here we touch on the heart of this piece — the cent­ral char­ac­ter on stage is Delbono’s hero, .

Bobò is a clown-like fig­ure who for more than forty years was closed in a men­tal hos­pital. He is deaf and dumb, and has micro­cephaly. He was ‘res­cued’ from an asylum by Del­bono. The artist, who was at a low point at the time, was brought up sharp by the harsh real­ity of Bobò’s situ­ation, and thus the two saved each other. Bobò is now a fix­ture in Delbono’s company.

The action takes place in a large met­al­lised room, with bright lights and hid­den doors. Some­times the action spills over into the seat­ing area with the cast dan­cing with mem­bers of the audi­ence, sit­ting with them, talk­ing to them, teas­ing them — but never embar­rass­ing them.… con­tinue reading

Compare and contrast: Beyoncé vs Anne Teresa De Keersmaker

 dance, music, video  No Responses »
Oct 142011
 

Bey­oncé is being accused of steal­ing dance moves for her new video Count­down from Bel­gian dan­cer and cho­reo­grapher Anne Teresa De Keersmaker. The pop star admit­ted that a 22-second sequence was inspired by , who cre­ated the Rosas Danst Rosa.

De Keers­maker said she had never been con­tac­ted for per­mis­sion and called the pop video “pure plagiarism.”

Bey­oncé said the bal­let was “one of many ref­er­ences” for the video, which also pays homage to .

A com­par­at­ive clip on , entitled Bey­oncé vs Anne Teresa De Keers­maker, shows the similarities:

… con­tinue reading

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