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 Volume 1, Number 9  November 24, 2003            An online supplement to DanceView magazine


Letter from New York
by Mindy Aloff
Project Bandaloop
by Clare Croft
Lili Cai's 15th Anniversary
by Paul Parish
Kennedy Center Opera House Reopens
by George Jackson
Cloud Gate
by Susan Reiter
Emspace and Bibliodance
by Ann Murphy
St. Petersburg in New York: Ballet
by Dale Braumer
Bailes Ineditos
by Tehreema Mitha
Riedel Dance Theater
by Mary Cargill
 

MIDWEEK EXTRA!
NYCB GALA OPENING

by Mindy Aloff

 

Letter from New York

24 November 2003.
Copyright ©2003 by Mindy Aloff

Last Sunday and Monday (November 16 and 17), the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum presented an evening dedicated to the reconstructions of two “lost” Balanchine ballets—Le Baiser de la Fée (1937, American Ballet; staged for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1940).) and Mozartiana (1945), both from Balanchine’s years as resident choreographer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo during and just after World War II. The program was organized by The George Balanchine Foundation, an archival organization that has devoted much of its considerable energy to reconstructing and filming Balanchine ballets long out of rep, as well as to filming original interpreters of familiar Balanchine roles, many now much changed over time, in the act of coaching young dancers from the point of view of what the first casts of Balanchine’s ballets actually were directed to do.
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past Letters from New York


Revamped in Red

The Kennedy Center Opera House is Back in Action

Opera House Preview Performance
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

by George Jackson
copyright © 2003 by George Jackson

[The Opera House at Kennedy Center closed for major refurbishing in December 2002. It reopened 11 months later for this performance, which Michael Kaiser, the Center's president, referred to in his introductory remarks as a "test". Kaiser said of the renovation that it was "nearly completed", and he also emphasized that a major goal was to make the Opera House more accessible. An organization for "promoting the creative power in people with disabilities", VSA Arts, was co-presenter with Kennedy Center of the three part program. ]

Thinking of the Kennedy Center's Opera House in its original guise, what comes to mind first and foremost is red. It was a very red theater when it opened in 1971 and neither time nor wear and tear altered that. The red was medium in tone, and the cloths that bore the color covered walls, ceiling, seats and floor. The stage curtain, on which a golden yellow pattern seemed woven into the red background, looked texturally festive. The other red fabrics didn't.
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Homage to St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg in New York: Ballet
St. Petersburg Through American Eyes
Celebration of the 300th Anniversary of the City of St. Petersburg
The Harriman Institute of Columbia University
November 6-16, 2003

By Dale Brauner
copyright © 2003 by Dale Brauner

St. Petersburg, Russia is to balletomanes what Wrigley Field is to baseball enthusiasts, Vienna is to music aficionados, and Rome is to Catholics. Many ballet lovers consider it the birthplace of the art form. St. Petersburg is the birthplace of George Balanchine, Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Fokine; the home of the Mariinsky Theatre and breeding ground to countless dance figures.

The city observed its 300th anniversary this year and events celebrating the “Venice of the North” are being held around the world. New York has the largest population of Russians living outside Russia, so it is only right that festivities have been staged here. The Harriman Institute of Columbia University presented “St. Petersburg Through American Eyes; Celebrating 300 Years of St. Petersburg." held from November 6-16. There were panels devoted to painting, music and literature, and also one devoted to ballet (moderated by Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance at Barnard College).  Participants were noted teacher Suki Schorer ("Transformed by America: Balanchine and the Maryinsky Tradition"); author Tim Scholl (“The Sleeping Beauty and St. Petersburg"); and critic Elizabeth Kendall (“Passing on the Petersburg Legacy"), a session on coaching with American Ballet Theatre principals Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky.
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"Look at How Gypsy I am!"

Bailes Ineditos
An evening of Flamenco
at the Jack Guidone Theater
Joy of Motion

Washington, D.C.
Saturday, 22nd November 2003

by Tehreema Mitha
coyright © 2003 by Tehreema Mitha

If you wanted an evening of quality entertainment this Saturday, you could have sauntered across to the modest Jack Guidone Theater at Friendship Heights, DC. The audience gathered there was in an excited expectant mood and the opening number to this evening of Flamenco dance did not disappoint.

Anna Menendez and Edwin Aparicio make a handsome pair on stage. They meld well, equal in their art, with a rapport that is so necessary to a coupling on stage. Menendez comes to life the minute she takes up the traditional Flamenco stance. Her arms become sinuous, strong yet effortlessly undulating, mesmerizing. She is full of constrained sensuousness. Aparicio’s stance makes the most of his packed frame. He dances as if born into this form, no unintended tensions apparent in the structure of the torso.
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Reprinted from the Midweek edition:

SALVATION GOREYFIED

Riedel Dance Theater
Joyce SoHo
New York, NY
November 20, 2003

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2003 by Mary  Cargill

Jonathan Riedel’s The Unsightful Nanny, based on Edward Gorey’s work and performed as part of last years Limón season at the Joyce, was one of the most unusual and mordantly funny works seen in sometime. So the news that Riedel had formed a company formed mainly from Limón dancers to present his own works, including a new Gorey piece, was exciting news. His company (making its Joyce debut) is performing at the Joyce Soho from November 20th through the 23rd.
read review

 

EXTRA!

A Gala Opening, with Brilliant Dancing

Serenade/Bugaku/Symphony in C
Gala, Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration
New York State Theater
New York, NY
November 25, 2003

by  Mindy Aloff
copyright ©2003 by Mindy Aloff

The news is that the audience left this gala drunk on the performance of George Balanchine’s Symphony in C, which, for the first time in memories going back at least a decade, fielded four principal couples who were more than adequate to their roles, a flock of demi-soloists who danced with finesse and close attention to detail, and a superbly rehearsed corps de ballet. Symphony in C—presented (with Concerto Barocco and Orpheus) at the inaugural performance of the New York City Ballet on October 11th, 1948—is debatably the cornerstone of the New York City Ballet repertory: both a condensation and a summation of Balanchine’s gifts and a monumental index to the full company’s depth and range. A Karinska tutu ballet that, in this production, begins with a squadron of 12 dancers at attention in fifth position and concludes with a battalion of 50, photographically arrested at the crest of a rousing, almost jazzily swinging march toward Georges Bizet’s top note, the work stakes a powerful claim to just about every aspect of the classical lexicon—adagio, allegro, jumps large and small, corkscrew turns and smooth tours, transition steps and lifts—and, the ultimate program closer, it wages what is debatably the most persuasive campaign on behalf of classical dancing in the past 100 years. Even in uneven or indifferent performances of it, the ballet advances toward a sense of triumph; it is dancer-proof in that its individuals become subsumed in a larger whirlwind of energy and choreographic design.
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Flying into the Unknown

Crossing, Stories of Gravity and Transformation
Project Bandaloop
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
November 21, 2003

by Clare Croft
copyright © 2003 by Clare Croft

Until Friday, I was an aerial dance virgin. After Friday, I am an aerial dance enthusiast. On the West Coast, there are many dancers and choreographers experimenting with hanging from ropes, but for the East Coast, Project Bandaloop’s Crossing, Stories of Gravity and Transformation was a welcome change of pace. Artistic Director Amelia Rudolph’s piece part performance, part documentary featured dancers in the air and on the ground. Projections from footage shot in the Sierra Nevadas, where the company enacted eighteen days of site-specific work, appeared on a giant trampoline that covered the back of the stage. Another trampoline covered the stage’s left wings. The piece as a whole suffered from a lack of cohesion, but when the choreography was beautiful, as it was when the dancers took to the air, it was a revolutionary experience.
read review


Silken Illusions

15th Anniversary Performance
LiliCai Chinese Dance Company
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theatre
San Francisco, California
November 15, 2003

by Paul Parish
copyright © 2003 by Paul Parish

The most interesting part of the Lili Cai Chinese Dance Company's fifteenth anniversary show last Saturday night was the series of stunning clips in the video retrospective, which was screened just before the intermission. The marvelous deep, high stage of the theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts downtown had just been filled with the snaking whorls of traditional Chinese ribbon dancing, beautifully lit, which at moments caught me up in complete fascination, watching the gorgeous silk reveal the inner secrets of turbulent currents, but then left me wool-gathering, reflecting (for example) on the possible debt of Loie Fuller to this form of Chinese dancing. The three dances performed that evening were too similar. In all of them, the dancers were there to make other things dance—you followed the movements of cloth, or of flames, not the bodies of the dancers. Which that night, for me, let me drift off into thought. But the clips in the video arrested me, held me tight, impressed me repeatedly with how strong the company is, how varied their repertory, how open they are to new influences and how successful they are in collaborating with artists from other cultures. I found myself wishing they were performing at least one dance that was more rhythmic and embodied, like their award-winning Common Ground (which they co-created with the African-heritage Dimensions Dance Theater) and is strong, earthy, and grounded.
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Deep Waters

Moon Water
Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, NY
November 20, 2003

By Susan Reiter
copyright © 2003 by Susan Reiter

When a theatrical experience is as mesmerizing and complete as Moon Water, the latest work brought to these shores by Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan, the afterglow resonates for days. The concept of creating a dance work drawing primarily on the movements of tai chi could have led to something insular—full of surface piety but distancing itself from an audience rather than communicating to it. But Moon Water was the most riveting 70 minutes I've experienced in a theater in a while, and the immensely focused, amazingly concentrated audience at BAM suggested that many were held equally rapt.
read article


Dionysian Screwball Comedy

This is not a peep
Emspace and Bibliodance
Dance Mission Theatre
San Francisco, California
November 14, 2003

by Ann Murphy
copyright © 2003 by Ann Murphy

Since coming on the scene as a dancer less than a decade ago, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart has stood out. When she moves she looks silken, molten and boneless, a mythical fish girl/woman, or a shapechanger who slips between the real world and the archetypical, the human and the animal. Part of Stuart's magic is that she projects a sexy emotional availability on stage that flows out of a viscous physicality. She is an antidote to local artists who have embraced dance like barbed wire, keeping out classical ideals of beauty, musical structure and human relationship on the premise that not only are those ideals suspect, if not politically bankrupt, but that everything sucks, has always sucked and will always suck, no matter what you do.
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This weeks' articles

 

DanceViewNY
Mindy  Aloff's Letter from New York

The Balanchine Celebration
New York City Ballet:
A Veteran and a Raw Recruit
by Mindy Aloff

Heart and Soul
by Mary Cargill

Kid Stuff
Cas Public's If You Go Down To the Woods Today
by Susan Reiter

DanceViewWest
San Francisco Ballet:
New Wheeldon (Rush)
by Rita Felciano

New Tomasson (7 For Eight)
by Paul Parish

Possokhov's New Firebird for OBT
by Rita Felciano

Moscow Festival Ballet and Scott Wells
by Paul Parish

DanceViewDC
Hamburg Ballet's Nijinsky:
Nijinsky—Lost in the Chaos
by Clare Croft

NijinskyMadness and Metaphor
by Alexandra Tomalonis

Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes
by George Jackson

Batsheva: Breaking Down Walls
by Lisa Traiger

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence
by Clare Croft

Choreographers Showcase
by Tehreema Mitha

Zoltan Nagy
by George Jackson

 

 

 

 

 

Writers

Mindy Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Clare Croft
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Lynn Garafola
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Gia Kourlas
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Jean Battey Lewis
Alexander Meinertz
Tehreema Mitha
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
Susan Reiter
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis(Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Meital Waibsnaider

Leigh Witchel

DanceView

The Autumn DanceView is out:

New York City Ballet's Spring 2003 season reviewed by Gia Kourlas

An interview with the Kirov Ballet's Daria Pavlenko by Marc Haegeman

Reviews of San Francisco Ballet (by Rita Felciano) and Paris Opera Ballet (by Carol Pardo)

The ballet tradition at the Metropolitan Opera (by Elaine Machleder)

Reports from London (Jane Simpson) and the Bay Area (Rita Felciano).

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last updated on November 24, 2003 -->