danceviewtimes

Listen Up!

Tap City’s Tap/Forward
The New York City Tap Festival
The Duke on 42nd Street
Friday, July 13, 2007, 7PM Show

“Savion Glover’s Invitation to a Dancer”
The Joyce Theater
Saturday, July 14 matinee

by Sali Ann Kriegsman
copyright © 2007 by Sali Ann Kriegsman

The rhythmic and technical virtuosity of contemporary tap dancers — women and men — requires that we be as attentive and intelligent as they are.  In other words, sharpen your senses and listen up!

The unfettered, audacious rhythmic freedom of American’s music, jazz,  is matched by the phenomenal rhythmic invention and improvisational flights of contemporary tap.

There was plenty to challenge, delight, educate and transport audiences in New York in mid-July, continuing proofs that rhythm tap dancing is having a glorious, historic renaissance and those who are missing it are going to be very sorry.

Very Mixed Offerings

"Making Television Dance"€
BBC TV
British Film Institute, London
5 to 25 June

"Ballet for the People"
Ballet Boyz Gala
Royal Festival Hall, London
14 and 15 July

"The Sleeping Beauty"€
Ballet of La Scala, Milan
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
25 to 29 July

by John Percival
copyright © 2007 by John Percival

The most enjoyable series of performances I have seen for quite a time was the British Film Institute's presentation entitled Making Television Dance. As long ago as the 1930s BBC television was offering its then modest audiences programmes by the Vic-Wells Ballet and specially made works by Antony Tudor which proved highly popular. Two decades on, when Margaret Dale decided (at only about thirty!) that her days as a dancer with Sadler's Wells Ballet were numbered, she first turned briefly to choreography with just one ballet that flopped, then began as an assistant on television programmes, saw the opportunities for developing the medium, and joined the BBC in 1954.

White Nights, Beige Days

A Letter from St. Petersburg

Ballet of the Maryinsky Theater
               Four Temperaments / La Valse / Aria Suspended:  evening July 7, 2007
               Romeo and Juliet: July 9, 2007
               Cinderella: July 10, 2007
    St. Petersburg State Academic Ballet Theatre “Leonid Jacobson”
                Romeo and Juliet: July 8, 2007

by George Jackson
      copyright © 2007 by George Jackson   

Choreographing for the Maryinsky ought not to be done casually, off the cuff. Due consideration is called for because of the company’s grand traditions, its gigantic size (about 200 dancers and countless support staff with their attendant entropy (i.e., resistance to change), and its current circumstances (a sort of dual directorship that observers have called an unending duel). Also taken into account must be the particular charge that comes with a commission and, if the piece is to outlast one season, the company’s long range repertory needs.   

 

R & J with Words (and Birds)

Shakespeare in the Park:  "Romeo and Juliet "

The Public Theater
Delacorte Theatre, New York
July 5, 2007

by Tom Phillips
copyright © 2007 by Tom Phillips                                                               

      

This spring and summer, New York has been treated to a three-ring circus of Romeos and Juliets — a pair of ballets by New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre (reviewed here in recent weeks) followed by the real thing — a lusty production of the play, before rapt audiences in the most romantic of settings, Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre. Thursday night’s performance began in a light rain, which beneficently ended midway through act one, accompanied by birdsongs and a flight of herons from the pond in front of Belvedere Castle, just in time for the balcony scene where the star-crossed lovers’ flame ignites.    

 

Her Way

Kyra Nichols’ Farewell
"Serenade," “Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze'”, and 'Der Rosenkvalier' from "Vienna Waltzes"
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater,
New York, NY
June 22, 2007   

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2007 by Mary Cargill    

Ballet dancers tend to live in people’s memories through the roles they create, the roles that are permanently linked to their careers. A dancer like Carlotta Grisi lives whenever "Giselle" is performed, and dancers whose lives intersect with great choreographers tend to survive in people’s memories the longest, dancers like Margot Fonteyn, or Patricia MacBride, or Suzanne Farrell. Kyra Nichols, though, has spent her dancing years in other dancers’ parts, most notably in the Farrell roles, which she has managed, through an impeccable technique, wonderful musicality, and sympathetic imagination, to make uniquely her own. The company, and her audience, bade goodbye to her in a program of ballets that she chose. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision, but each ballet was about saying farewell, leaving the cheering audience both sad and grateful to have had so many years.