JEFFREY BROWN: Though ballet in America was once dominated by a few major companies and concentrated in New York and a handful of other cities, today there are more than 65 professional, million-dollar-plus-budget ballet companies scattered around the country. For a festival titled “Ballet Across America,” the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., has brought nine of these groups together for a series of performances. Three of the company’s artistic directors join me now to discuss the state of ballet in America: Dorothy Gunther Pugh, founder and artistic director of Ballet Memphis, Ashley Wheater, former ballet master of San Francisco Ballet and currently director of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and Ib Andersen, artistic director of Ballet Arizona and member of the Balanchine Trust, the organization responsible for preserving and licensing the late choreographer’s work. Welcome to all of you.

Dorothy, when you look around the country, what’s working, what’s exciting when you think about the state of ballet in America?

DOROTHY GUNTHER PUGH: One thing that’s very exciting to me is the amount of young choreographers now I feel like who are starting to be tapped to do new work. And I think that’s really important. And it may be, as I was joking with Ib earlier about maybe I’m reaching my old crone years, but I think it’s really important that we nurture young people and give them the right gifts.

JEFFREY BROWN: You were just telling me, Ashley, that tonight’s performance, there’s is a young Taiwanese-American. So how do you find these new young people and the new choreographers?

ASHLEY WHEATER: I think that it’s having your radar very sensitive to what’s going on, not only in America but across the world. And for me one of the things about running the Joffrey is that it has always been known as an American classic, that Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino were always pushing the boundary, and so to discover young American talent is something that I feel very strongly about. I think that, you know, we are based right in the middle of the country. I think it’s a great place for us to have a new work and then take it across America, and so I’m thrilled that in the last couple of years I’ve had two young American choreographers be able to do world premieres for us.

JEFFREY BROWN: Ib Andersen, you have this connection to one of the great masters of choreography through George Balanchine. How do you connect the classics and the younger choreographers, the younger dancers?

IB ANDERSEN: Well, I’m in Arizona — the company is 25 years old, 24 actually — so my job right now is very much a job of educating the audience. Running a company, of course, you have to make it financially feasible. You have to get the people in the seats. For me, it’s been a slow sort of way to introduce new work. You can’t just do a lot of ballets that are a sort of risky because the audience is not going to come. Not in Phoenix.

JEFFREY BROWN: Most of the time you are presenting some standards.

IB ANDERSEN: We are using, you know, “Swan Lake,” and then I do some things that I know are going to bring the audience in. Usually one that is maybe a little more risky, but it’s tricky, you know. For me, in Phoenix, it’s really about educating the audience. Maybe 10, 15 years from now we will have educated the audience enough that they will come to things that are much more risky. But you can’t afford, we cannot afford, you know, to put something on that the audience is not going to come. Simply we will fold.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, I mean this idea of connecting to an audience, but also a particular place. You’re in Memphis, how do you use place and try to build audience?

DOROTHY GUNTHER PUGH: It may seem like it’s a no-brainer, because the part of the world that I’m from has changed the world culturally. If you think of it — it’s the home of rock ‘n’ roll –

JEFFREY BROWN: — Right, but we don’t think of ballet though, we think of the blues and –

DOROTHY GUNTHER PUGH: — And I have the white European art form and an audience that is accustomed to the bubbling up underneath of art that’s really sort of populist and it comes from the not-so-lovely voice of the people. It’s not the coastal wealth that determines the voice of the people there, and so it’s been my job for years to think, to listen to what they sing about and what we say, what we sing about, what are our stories, what literature has come from our place. And so we’re dancing to Roy Orbison’s music, and when you listen to those things you meld them with what you know, which is the incredible, beautiful technique of ballet. But you really have to navigate a difficult ocean to find the work and reflect it back to the people who are your constituency, because it’s their — to me they have voices that we need to listen to. They inform who we are and then we try to make work that includes them somehow. And this particular piece has been successful that way, and so Roy Orbison was like the Placido Domingo of country music — he was, you know. And if you listen to that voice, it’s very, very compelling and that’s kind of what we’ve done. We do this thing called the Memphis Project and this is part of our Memphis Project work.

artists of The New York City ballet

Hollywod Reporter review of the dance doc NY Export: Opus Jazz as screened at the annual South By Southwest festival in Austin.

AUSTIN — A piece of the past is beautifully revived in “NY Export: Opus Jazz,” a note-perfect adaptation of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 “ballet in sneakers” that updates the street-cool vibe of a piece reminiscent of his “West Side Story.”

Slated to air this year on PBS’s “Great Performances,” the work also has strong home-video appeal for performing arts devotees; producers would be smart to license it for inclusion in a package with “West Side Story” when that film makes its way to Blu-ray.

With no overt narrative, the film uses mostly wordless, tone-poem-like scraps of city life as transitions between dance scenes. Dancers from the New York City Ballet play characters in those transitions, wandering through NYC locations that have rarely if ever been seen onscreen — Brooklyn’s abandoned McCarren Park Pool, for instance — until Robert Prince’s cool-cat score kicks in and a dance coalesces.

With its unpeopled locations and occasional nods to the Fifties (when was the last time you saw a gaggle of youths in a malt shop?), the staging is adrift in time, making these young dancers strangely immortal — standing in for every kid who has ever found herself with a surplus of energy and creativity, living unattached in the big city.

Jody Lee Lipes’ widescreen cinematography more than does justice to the city, showing sides unknown to tourists, and to the dance itself, which unfolds as naturally across this rough terrain as on a polished stage. If the dancers are uncomfortable wearing sneakers and dodging weeds, splinters and crumbling concrete, it doesn’t show.

Venue: South by Southwest Festival

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Yuan Yuan Tan

San Francisco Ballet’s The Little Mermaid is NOT for the kids.

From The San Francisco Chronicle 03-17-10

The biggest mystery of San Francisco Ballet’s 2010 season is this week’s U.S. premiere of John Neumeier’s “The Little Mermaid.” Neumeier, for 37 years the director of Germany’s Hamburg Ballet, hasn’t taken any cues from Disney: His ballet makes writer Hans Christian Andersen a character in the story, and he presents the mermaid as a tragic creature whose exquisitely flexible movement is inspired by Balinese dance styles.

Neumeier’s place in the ballet world is as singular as his interpretation of the tale. Born in Milwaukee, he started dancing late and studied at Britain’s Royal Ballet School before beginning his performing and choreography careers at the Stuttgart Ballet. While many American choreographers followed George Balanchine’s influence and created pure movement ballets, Neumeier pursued large-scale story productions, from an idiosyncratic revision of “Swan Lake” to dance versions of dramas like “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Neumeier, who also designed the costumes (check out Tamara Straus’ Arts and Ends column today for more on that), says he is having his “American year,” with American Ballet Theatre performing his “Lady of the Camellias” in May. He spoke from Germany.

Q: We should quickly dispel any idea that your “Little Mermaid” is a kid production.

A: Yes, for one thing, the violence in the story is quite strong. The mermaid allows herself to be literally torn apart to get to her goal. And she meets an ambiguous ending – it certainly isn’t happy. She refuses to kill the prince, and attempts suicide instead. But she’s rewarded by becoming a daughter of the air. She continues her search in another realm.

Q: Unlike 19th century story ballets, in your work the story comes across entirely without pantomime.

A: The viewer can read the story purely through the physicality. There’s an important contrast between the underwater characters and those on earth. When the mermaid comes to earth, the people look extremely weird to her. And when she must conform to the human world, we see an ungainliness in her.

Q: It strikes me that, far more than most choreographers I speak with, you always return to talking about the story.

A: I believe dance is about the human being, not the human body. How interesting can physicality be when it has another dimension? Story and movement – the two things together for me have a power that’s incredible.

But emotional response is where story starts. I don’t think story is about facts and information, like in the newspaper. The stories we can tell in dance are emotional responses in human relationships. Yet the great tendency now in contemporary ballet is that it is only about the movement.

Q: Your work dissolves the separation between dancing and drama. What is the key?

A: What I’ve always felt in working with literary material as inspiration is that the criterion is transformation of that material to a non-intellectual medium. Because I don’t think dance is intellectual. It’s more related to the experience of dreams than actuality. I believe you don’t understand a ballet; you have an experience of it.

Q: Do you think you could have developed in the same way if you had stayed in America?

A: Funny enough, when I went to study with Royal Ballet for a year and stayed a year to work, (Royal Ballet director) Ninette de Valois said she would speak with Balanchine. Then I was offered a Stuttgart contract. Then I heard back that Balanchine was interested in me. If that had come a few days earlier, I would have been in New York. I think I would have been the same choreographer, but I was lucky to find fertile soil. Being an artist is like being a rose; wherever you’re planted, the life urgency is strong.

Q: This was your first time working with the San Francisco Ballet. How was it?

A: I’m very open with my emotions when I’m demonstrating, and the dancers in San Francisco responded. I don’t just sell ballets anywhere. I think, what can I give to this company, and what can they give to me? Seeing Yuan Yuan (Tan) and Sarah (Van Patten), so different from my mermaids in Hamburg, and to discover new understandings of the ballet together – the company has given me a lot.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/17/DDCR1CECDS.DTL#ixzz0iUdvenPH

The Little Mermaid: Program 5, San Francisco Ballet. 8 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Performances through March 28. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. (415) $20-$150. 865-2000. www.sfballet.org.

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Jillian Lewis Style #120

Jillian Lewis, a former Project Runway finalist, has a new line of dancewear.

This collection of dancewear fuses both of Jillian’s life passions; dance and fashion. The leotards borrow details from dresses. The leggings, t-shirts, shorts, skirts, tutu’s and belts can be worn for dance or as everyday clothing. The collection has sporty styles that borrow details from athletic clothing; sexy styles that play around with sheer combinations of material, mesh and lace; and feminine styles that will appeal to serious ballerinas. Children’s styles have been included as well.

Jillian’s understanding of a dancer’s needs for movement and functionality combined with her design skills and high taste level will allow this collection to stand out among the rest.

Amy Brandt

From Suzanne Farrell Ballet Company Bio Page

Amy Brandt hails from Libertyville, Illinois, and received her initial dance training at Dancenter North, the Ruth Page Foundation, and the Milwaukee Ballet School. She later joined the Milwaukee Ballet, where she danced featured roles in works by George Balanchine, Alonzo King, Mark Godden, and Anthony Tudor, among others. She joined The Suzanne Farrell Ballet in 2003. Amy also freelances with several companies in New York City and is a founding member of Ad Hoc Ballet. She currently writes the “Ask Amy” advice column for Pointemagazine.  Amy also serves as the Company’s Shoe Coordinator.

What is your favorite role to dance and why?
I have so many! I love the fun and jazziness of Balanchine’s Rubies and Who Cares. But if I had to choose, it would probably be the Peasant Pas de Trois from Swan Lake. Not only does the role include lots of jumps and hops en pointe (which I love), but it also calls for lots of personality. And Tchaikovsky’s grand, gorgeous music always fills me with excitement and joy.

How do you prepare yourself for the physical challenges of dancing ballet?
Years of dancing professionally has taken a toll on my body, so before class I spend a lot of time trying to loosen up or strengthen my “problem areas,” like my ankles and hips. I’m not naturally flexible, so after class I stretch my hamstrings and back for about 15 minutes. When the day is done, I massage and ice any tight or swollen areas and sometimes take a bath with Epsom salts. I also try to schedule massage and acupuncture appointments when I can.

Do you feel an affinity for a particular choreographer?
I definitely feel an affinity for Balanchine. His movement style feels very natural to me, and I love his musicality. His choreography always makes me feel like I have to stretch myself to the limit, and I appreciate a good challenge.

What do you like to do when you’re not dancing?
I love to read, anything from fiction to historical nonfiction to the newspaper. I write a bit too, and recently wrote some articles for Dance Magazine. I also enjoy traveling, going to museums, the theater, or listening to live music. But mostly I enjoy a night out with my friends – it doesn’t matter where we go as long as we’re having fun.

What is the most common myth about being a ballerina?
That we don’t eat! So many people think female dancers live off iceberg lettuce and Diet Coke. And yes, there are a few of those types out there. But not me – eating is one of the highlights of my day! Besides, I wouldn’t have the energy to get through rehearsals without a good meal.

What’s the biggest reward in your career?
I think the most rewarding experiences in my career have been performing for children. I was once part of an educational outreach team that would give demonstrations to second grade classrooms, and for some of these kids we were their first exposure to ballet. It was so rewarding to hear their raw reactions, blurting things out loud and clapping excitedly. I love bringing a little bit of joy to a child’s day and teaching them something new.

What do you do as the company’s shoe coordinator?
In addition to dancing with the company, I also manage the dancers’ shoes. It’s my job to keep files on everyone’s shoe size and specifications, place orders, and make sure everything is delivered on time. I also have to do a lot of problem solving; last minute casting/costume changes and back ordered shoes are common sources of stress!

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ABT Irina Dvorovenko

ABT has enjoyed a 70-year history of bringing great theater to classical dance. ABT continues the tradition this spring with Robbin’s Fancy Free, MacMillan’sRomeo and Juliet, Ashton’s The Dream and a Company Premiere of Neumeier’sLady of the Camellias.

TRIVIA: In what play-turned-ballet did Nora Kaye’s flying fist accidentally knock Igor Youskevitch unconscious? Submit answer on ABT’s Facebook page.

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Lar Lubovitch

03-03-10 NY Times review by Claudia La Rocco

Lar Lubovitch opened his two-week run at the Joyce Theater last Tuesday night with a program underlining his abiding interest in jazz.

But my mind kept running to two unrelated dance responses to jazz music: “The Spirit Moves,” Mura Dehn’s miraculous history of black social dance, and the scene from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, when the kids bust out with wonderfully peculiar solos. These films — one depicting virtuosic performers, the other animated — couldn’t be more different. Yet both possess what Mr. Lubovitch’s polished reaction to jazz painfully lacks: a certain compelling messiness or strangeness, spontaneity (often as a metaphor for freedom) and the celebration of individuality within a larger group.

Mr. Lubovitch creates pleasant works that show off his deep ties to the modern tradition. He makes his dancers look good, and they in turn look as if they’re having a lot of fun tearing through his physically taxing dances (though the plastered-on smiles grow old fast).

But he does not create works to set a viewer’s imagination or intellect spinning. And so it is especially unfortunate to see his choreography alongside artists like John Coltrane and Jackson Pollock, as was the case Tuesday in the premiere of “Coltrane’s Favorite Things.”

By placing his dancers in front of a backdrop reproduction of Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (No. 30)” and choreographing to a recording of a live performance of “My Favorite Things” by the John Coltrane Quartet, Mr. Lubovitch said in program notes that he hoped “to tether Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ to Pollock’s ‘field of action,’ ” through “arranged ribbons of movement.”

His athletic, jaunty movement, full of sculptured lifts, swooping torsos and outstretched limbs, did indeed seem ribbonlike, but mostly in the sense of feeling lightweight, and as if these organic phrases might have been attached to anything. No meaningful tethering occurred between Coltrane’s music and Pollock’s painting.

The story is all too similar for “Nature Boy: Kurt Elling” (2005) and “Elemental Brubeck” (2005), also both named for the composers whose music inspired Mr. Lubovitch. “Nature Boy” is moody and deals mostly with interlocking love duets, while “Elemental Brubeck” is an energetic ode to Mr. Lubovitch’s memories of doing the jitterbug as a teenager in the 1950s.

Social dancing references are threaded throughout the three works, adding warmer tones to their classical modern vocabulary, breezy spatial patterns and predictable depictions of romantic entanglements. But nowhere do these works become memorably strange or distinct; nowhere are they governed by a sensibility that seems anything more substantial than amiable.

Lar Lubovitch Dance Company performs through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.

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American Ballet Theatre

From The Wall Street Journal wsj.com 03-02-10

American Ballet Theatre, one of the top dance companies in the U.S., will not present a fall repertory season in New York this year, citing the need for rehearsal time for its new production of “The Nutcracker,” and the difficulty of fund raising in the current economic climate.

“The reason we chose not to do a fall season is that we’re investing a great deal of resources into ‘The Nutcracker,’” said the company’s executive director, Rachel Moore. “The fall seasons are very expensive for us,” she added. “To have to raise money for both ventures was risky.”

The company’s projected deficit for its previous fiscal year, ending December 2009, is $925,000, according to a spokeswoman for the company, Kelly Ryan. ABT’s production of “The Nutcracker” is being backed by a $2.5 million gift from David Koch, which is meant to be matched by funds raised from other donors. The company has currently raised $1.2 million in additional funds, according to Ms. Moore. Mr. Koch, an oil and gas billionaire, is a vice chairman of ABT’s board.

ABT does not have its own theater. From 1997 to 2008, the company offered fall repertory seasons at New York City Center. At its height in 2003, the fall programming schedule for the company included 23 performances over the course of three weeks. In 2009, after complications related to City Center’s renovation schedule, ABT moved its fall season to Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, where it presented just four days of performances. The company offers a regular spring season, typically heavy in full-length classical ballets, at the Metropolitan Opera House. It also tours the U.S. and overseas.

Ms. Moore said the company’s decision to commission its new “Nutcracker,” to be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning Dec. 23, was made before it decided to scrap its traditional slate of fall programming. BAM has committed to a five-year run of ABT’s “Nutcracker,” which is being created by the company’s resident choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky. ABT will present a two-week run of the production this year, with the performance schedule expected to increase to four weeks over the following years.

Ms. Moore said she expects ABT to reinstitute a fall season in 2011, and for years to come. “We absolutely have every intention of having a fall season in the future. We are committed to having three identified seasons, one being a fall season, one being a ‘Nutcracker,’ and one being the operatic spring season,” she said. As for the location, Ms. Moore said the company has “not shut the door to any venue,” and does not expect to make such a decision for about nine months.

“ABT has never had a ‘Nutcracker’ as a stabilizing force in its life, so this is a huge opportunity for us to build a business model that has a level of stability in it,” said Ms. Moore. “Given the difficulty of the economic environment, it was not the year to take wild risks in terms of fundraising.”

“The Nutcracker,” more popular with children and tourists than with some dance aficionados, is far and away the biggest moneymaker for ballet companies around the country. The New York City Ballet performs it every year at Lincoln Center. The ABT has performed “The Nutcracker” before on occasion—a production with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland is still available on DVD—but never as an annual fixture in New York.

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Karen Gabay

The dictionary defines “spectacular” as “engrossingly dramatic” or “very big.” Well, Ballet San Jose’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which continues at the Center for the Performing Arts through Sunday, is spectacular in both senses.

Dennis Nahat first choreographed Shakespeare’s tale of doomed young love in 1986 for the Cleveland Ballet. Now he has revived it, with refurbished sets and costumes, giving his company one of its more ambitious full-length story ballets. The wait and the effort have more than paid off.

Some of David Guthrie’s costumes are a little loud, but his set — with the Capulet and Montague homes positioned on either side of the stage (“two households, both alike in dignity”) — plunges the audience right into the center of the conflict.

Since Prokofiev’s score was written as a suite of musical numbers, arranging them to suit choreographic needs is relatively easy for a choreographer. Nahat wasn’t shy about doing so, and most of his choices are dramatically defensible. To extend the wedding scene, for instance, he borrowed music written for the bedroom scene, and he moved the “mandolin dance” into the first act to show Juliet with her girlfriends.

Nahat also added small dramatic touches to knit plot and characters more tightly together. We learn that the virago Lady Capulet (Beth Ann Ramey) is in a loveless marriage, hence her affair with the implacable Tybalt (Willie Anderson) and her coldness toward Juliet.

Despite that straitjacket, Nahat tries to make something of these scenes. He packs the markets with individual vignettes to enliven them. Friar Laurence (Nahat at his hammiest), for instance, talks with children and leads a procession accompanied by an acrobat (Akira Takahashi) and his attendants. In addition to the happy, happy ensemble dancing, Nahat uses the crowd as a sort of Greek chorus to nose in on Juliet’s letter and collectively recoil at the double murder.

Since the Kirov Ballet first performed “Romeo and Juliet” in 1940, Prokofiev’s score has become the most choreographed in 20th-century ballet. If the San Jose troupe’s verve and commitment lagged a little toward the end, it had less to do with these fine dancers, or Dwight Oltman’s conducting, than with Nahat’s sprawling concept, which clocks in at over three hours.

Still, Karen Gabay — on stage for just about the whole evening — gave the performance of a lifetime as Juliet. Though her technique was a little blurred on opening night, her Juliet had depth and nuance from the moment she chased her nurse (the inimitable Loni Mahler) until her final scene where she grabs that knife. She opens herself to Romeo in full awareness of what is happening and, anguished though she is, implacably stays the course. Her portrayal is ice and fire.

Solas has all the accoutrements of a fine Romeo; he is handsome, and he dances with elegant lines and a lovely, courtly demeanor. Though he had some trouble with the balcony scenes’ demanding lifts, that was less troublesome than the sense that he was too often dancing the role, rather than fully inhabiting it.

Two additional teams — Alexsandra Meijer/Rudy Candia and Maria Jacobs-Yu/Moreno — will also perform the title roles this weekend.

Ballet San Jose

Presenting “Romeo and Juliet”
When: 8 tonight-Saturday, 1:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, 255 Almaden Blvd.
Tickets: $30-$85; www.balletsj.org

Merde is proud to supply the Ballet San Jose company and Ballet San Jose School with shoes, tights, leotards, accessories and more and Karen Gabay with her custom Bloch pointe shoes.

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Kate Moss

Kate Moss is trading her heels for some ballet flats, training to become a ballerina for a short film by Michael Clarke, Elle UK reports. Moss is set to start a three-month long schooling for the part, and will begin filming in July in Marseille. She’ll be dancing alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the film is rumored to be named “Baryshnimoss.”

“In Michael’s eye as a film-maker, the movement of the camera dances already by itself. It will be an extremely interesting collaboration and the film will be the result of the dance,” a source told the Daily Mail UK. The film will be screened at a fundraiser in the future.

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