21 March 2013, McCaw Hall, Seattle This program was a particularly generous one from Peter Boal’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, consisting as it did of four works: George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Paul Gibson’s Mozart Pieces, Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. It was also a diverse program showcasing a range of
15 March, Brown Theater, Wortham Center, Houston, TX Houston Ballet’s most recent program had the slightly confusing title of The Rite of Spring when in fact it was a triple bill in which Stanton Welch’s reimagining of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was simply the final offering on the program. Nevertheless, it was probably the most anticipated of the three works on
10 March 2013, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco In a year that has already seen various dance productions set to Stravinsky’s 100 year old Rite of Spring, and will see more as the year progresses, Yuri Possokhov’s new version for San Francisco Ballet will surely have to count as one of the most dramatic. Full of suspense and tension,
09 March 2013 (matinee), War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco What a glorious program Helgi Tomasson put together as Program 3 in San Francisco Ballet’s current repertory season. With works by George Balanchine, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, to me it said the 20th century had a great choreographer in Balanchine but look where the 21st century is heading with
1 March 2013, James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Morning Star is the result of two years of research and choreographic development between Elizabeth Dalman and her Mirramu Dance Company based in Bungendore, New South Wales, and communities in Arnhem Land. The work is based on a sacred songline of the Yolngu people that deals with birth, life, death and
Living Treasure is a brief memoir: brief but appealing in its thoughtful discussion of the early directorial careers of Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon. Author John Ellison Davies, former critic for the now defunct newspapers Nation Review and The National Times, focuses on the last years of the 1970s and remarks it was a time ‘when most of their adventure
Admirers of Hannah O’Neill, and there are many if my web statistics are anything to go by, may be interested to read the following post on Laura Capelle’s website Bella Figura. In addition to what is written on the site, there is a link to an article written by Capelle for the American dance magazine Pointe. The article was published in the February/March issue
Just recently I received a query relating to my article on the Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet published in Dance Research in 2011. In that article I mentioned that there were some ancillary activities associated with the Sydney season of the company’s tour and noted that ‘a demonstration of the Cecchetti technique took place in conjunction with Sydney ballet teacher Richard White’.
Earlier in February I had the pleasure of recording an oral history interview with Athol Willoughby, former dancer with the National Theatre Ballet and other companies, and an esteemed Melbourne-based ballet teacher over several decades. Tasmanian-born, Willoughby first took up ballet in Hobart with Beattie Jordan but soon moved to Melbourne to further his training at the National Theatre Ballet School under
Suzana Braga’s biography of Tatiana Leskova was first published in Brazilian Portuguese as Uma bailarina solta no mundo in 2005. It went into a second edition and in late 2012 was translated into English by Donald Scrimgeour with the title Tatiana Leskova: a ballerina at large. A translation augured well for Leskova’s English-speaking admirers, and for those who were more than aware