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January 6, 2010

A City Ballet Star's Reinventions
by Gia Kourlas
January 4, 2010
The New York Times

When Peter Boal retired from New York City Ballet in 2005, he left a gap at the dance barre. As it happens, there just aren’t enough well-proportioned, innately elegant men with scrupulous line and demeanor to go around.

This week Mr. Boal, 44, returns to New York, not as a dancer but as the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, a position he has held since he left City Ballet. (Last summer he signed on for another five years.) For its engagement at the Joyce Theater, running Tuesday through Sunday, Pacific Northwest will present a program of repertory works, including two created for it: Twyla Tharp’s “Opus 111” and Benjamin Millepied’s “3 Movements.” Also included are two smaller pieces, Marco Goecke’s solo “Mopey” and Edwaard Liang’s duet “Für Alina.”

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The Meaning of Zunch: Paul Taylor "Celebrates 80" at City Center
by Suzanne Carbonneau
December 28, 2009
Playbill Arts

In proposing his famous conundrum “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” William Butler Yeats could well have been writing about the work of Paul Taylor. So towering is Taylor’s achievement as a dance- maker that it is all too easy to gloss over his importance as a dancermaker. But Yeats would have understood that Taylor’s accomplishment is the result of a manifest unity of vision. A world-class virtuoso, Taylor was his own first remarkable creation. Possibly no other dancer of his hulking size—before or since—has possessed his silken flow or nuanced dynamics. Lincoln Kirstein attempted to persuade him to join New York City Ballet to dance leading roles in Balanchine ballets, but Taylor wanted to build a complete world from the ground up. He performed with his own company for the first two decades of its existence, establishing a standard for dancing of immense physical and imaginative attainment.

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Matt Turney, Longtime Dancer With Martha Graham, Dies at 84
by Jennifer Dunning
December 29, 2009
The New York Times

Matt Turney, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, died on Dec. 20 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 84 and lived in Poughkeepsie.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Mary Hinkson, a longtime friend and colleague.

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Philadelphia Arts Champion Peggy Amsterdam Dies
by Maya Rao
December 27, 2009
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Peggy Amsterdam, 60, of Center City, whose longtime advocacy of the economic and social importance of the arts in Philadelphia drew national recognition and included a successful push to stop a state-proposed tax on arts and cultural activities in 2009, died of cancer at home Saturday.

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Choreographic Climate Change
by Alastair Macaulay
December 31, 2009
The New York Times

HOW do we judge a decade’s worth of dance? If you try political relevance as a creative yardstick, dance looks diminutive. Some choreographers were politically and socially engaged, and some created dances (or multimedia works including dance) that reacted to 9/11 or the war in Iraq, but few, if any, mattered. And that indicates the nature of this art. The most important dance of the 1930s was not Kurt Jooss’s “Green Table” (a celebrated satirical comment on the futility of peace negotiations) but Balanchine’s “Serenade” (which says much about America, ballet and women but nothing about the political situation of its day). Martha Graham’s best dances were seldom her most politically specific.

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Best of the Decade: Dance
by Sarah Kaufman
December 27, 2009
The Washington Post

If you're selective, it's a kind of heaven on earth: Anna Pavlova, Rudolf Nureyev -- and Christopher Walken soaring to Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice." YouTube's emergence as a vast treasury of dance has been the major new development of the decade for this ephemeral art, whose past had been virtually inaccessible outside of brick-and-mortar performing-arts libraries. You could say YouTube has also bound us all more tightly together as a tribe of everyday shimmiers -- or, alternatively, allowed us to make global jackasses of ourselves -- through amateur uploadings of danced wedding processionals and choreographed shopping-mall be-ins.

Either way, technology has been the defining trendsetter in dance. Look at the rise of dance contests on TV. But the bad news is that concert-dance programming on public television has all but vanished this decade.

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Times Change, Dancers Transcend
by Allan Ulrich
December 30, 2009
The San Francisco Chronicle

In a single phrase - from Y2K to why not me? - the dance world, always a reflection of the society it illuminates, went from anxiety to resolve during the decade. Dancers and choreographers responded to the political and economic tribulations we all endured. And somehow in a way that artists manage, they often transcended them. Dance remains a global activity, and the Bay Area, for all its air of exceptionalism, is scarcely immune from the vexations that plague other communities.

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Are We Overdosing on Balanchine?
January 2010
Dance Magazine

Last May Sarah Kaufman wrote a tirade in The Washington Post entitled, “Make Room Onstage for More Than One Genius.” In it she claimed that “we are cursed with an overload” of Balanchine’s works. She pined for more “human” ballets, like those of Lew Christensen, Eugene Loring, and Catherine Littlefield in the 1930s, and called for a return to narrative. She claimed that the ballet world is “suffering through a dearth of daring and imagination,” and that Balanchine’s influence has led to bizarrely sinewy and abstract choreography.

Dance Magazine decided to talk to 12 leading figures to get their reactions. We interviewed artistic directors, teachers, and choreographers and found each of them to be thrillingly articulate about Balanchine’s gifts and bracingly honest in their readiness to move forward. Thank you, Ms. Kaufman, for stirring the pot.

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New UK Government Fund To Create Arts Jobs For The Unemployed
by Alistair Smith
December 24, 2009
The Stage (UK)

Young people looking to break into the creative industries are to be given a boost, after the government confirmed £1.3 million of funding to help create 200 new jobs in the sector.

They will be open to people aged 18-24, who have been claiming benefits, and will include posts such as theatre technician, costume and wardrobe assistant, community arts officer and business administrator. All will include a level of accredited training, mentoring and support in a bid to ensure that the young people are given the skills to progress.

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Making Art in the Now World
by John Lopez
December 27, 2009
The Los Angeles Times

"What it means to be an artist today -- where do we start on that one?" muses Ed Ruscha, almost nonplused. Finally, the soft-spoken art veteran decides : "It means facing a lot of information that's going to be very difficult to take in and swallow because there's so much of it."

Once the ramifications settle in, he slyly drawls, "to grasp the total picture would make you wish you could go back to 1960 when things were a bit slower, almost like the Dark Ages."

That dizziness finds a counterpoint with fledgling film director Michael Mohan on a cold December night in Westwood. His youthful exuberance contrasts with Ruscha's measured bemusement: "It's not like it's going to be crazy; it is crazy, right now."

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