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 Volume 4, Number 12  March 27, 2006    The weekly online supplement to DanceView magazine
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Russian Ballets Clash

by John Percival
copyright 2006 by John Percival

We all know, don’t we, that the London season by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden Opera House in 1956, a half century ago, introduced Soviet ballet to the west. Well, actually that isn’t true. Ignoring tours by small concert groups, there is the little fact that the Stanislavsky Ballet, also from Moscow, gave a season at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, earlier that year, with Bourmeister’s Swan Lake and two mixed bills. And a specially composed company of dancers from the Bolshoi and the Kirov had actually arrived in Paris in 1954 under official auspices, only to find their season cancelled on political grounds.
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A Very Serious Matter

"Requiem"
The Royal Danish Ballet
Det Kongelige Teater
Copenhagen, Denmark
March 24, 2006

by Eva Kistrup
copyright 2006 by
Eva Kistrup

Whether to call Tim Rushton's full evening creation for the Royal Danish Ballet a success depends on the criteria you use to define "success." If you expect a new ballet that will redefine the company and have a long stay in the repertoire, "Requiem" is not a success. The subject matter (Death and Life), the choice of music (two Polish composers from the last century, Henryk Göbecki and Karol Setmanowski), the need for a full chorus and singers in itself will doom "Requiem" to a short run and a limited future. But more importantly although it is very well choreographed and brilliantly danced, it is not very exciting, and that has a lot to do with ballet's the quasi-religious banal philosophic framework. You cannot disagree that war and death should not happen to nice people. Especially nice people like the Royal Danish Ballet.
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A Morris Quartet

"Cargo," "All Fours," "Candleflowerdance," "Going Away Party"(Program C)
Mark Morris Dance Group
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Brooklyn, NY
March 22, 2005

by Susan Reiter
copyright 2006 by
Susan Reiter

Leave it to Mark Morris to astound with the depth of musicality to be found in the simple motion of rising and falling. In "Candleflowerdance," one of two New York premieres on the last of the Mark Morris Dance Group's three 25th-anniversary programs, the cast of six performs a sequence of leaning, sinking and rising so fluidly that they seem to be sharing a single breath. As they stand close and give in to the supple, suspended movement, it all comes across as the most logical—perhaps the only possible—response to the music—a languid, meandering section at the end of Stravinsky's Serenade in A (1925).
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Inside Out

"Autopsy"
Choreography by Ashleigh Leite
Joyce Soho
New York City
March 11, 2006

by Nancy Dalva
copyright 2006 by
Nancy Dalva

"How to keep the flight of mind yet be exact."
Virginia Woolf

Ashleigh Leite's intense quintet called "Autopsy" marvelously establishes her as a choreographer to be seen, and seen again—for herself in performance, for what she gives her dancers and how she allows them to make themselves seen and known, and for her original mind. Hers is as visceral a dance art as you would expect from a former assistant and rehearsal director of the Stephen Petronio Company, and she is the same gorgeous dish he anatomized—and set loose!—in his "City of Twist." She's silky, she's beautiful, she's hot; yet here's what she is not: superficial, self-conscious, or self-involved. While it's true that her journey in this work is from the interior, she takes a novelist's eye to her material, spinning it out on her company of four, so that you can get to know them severally, and separately.
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Writers

Mindy Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Eva Kistrup
Alan M. Kriegsman
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Alexander Meinertz
Kate Mattingly
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
John Percival
Tom Phillips
Michael Popkin
Naima Prevots
Susan Reiter
Lisa Rinehart
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis (Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Kathrine Sorley Walker
Leigh Witchel
David Vaughan

DanceView

The Winter Issue of DanceView is OUT!
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Review of ABT's City Center Season by Gay Morris.

John Percival reviews biographies of Margot Fonteyn and Mathilde Kschessinska.

Michael Popkin on Painting, Ballet and Choreography.

A Mid-Season Report on Miami City Ballet, by Carol Pardo

MCB's Jennifer Kronenberg interviewed by Dale Brauner

Reports from London (Jane Simpson) and San Francisco (Rita Fellciano).

This site is the online supplement to DanceView, a quarterly review of dance published since 1979.

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last updated on March 20, 2006