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"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

The Wonderful World of Dance: Ballet Now – First commissions announced

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7 November 2017

Birmingham Royal Ballet, in association with Sadler’s Wells, has announced the first three choreographers and first two composers commissioned as part of Ballet Now – a unique five-year programme of professional development for choreographers, composers and designers funded by Oak Foundation.

Ballet Now will create two new one-act ballets per year for five years, each with a choreographer, composer and designer who are creating their first dance piece for a large company on a large stage. In total 30 artists will collaborate on these new works, helping to grow the pool of artistic talent available to ballet companies world-wide.

This not only guarantees ten new ballets for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s dancers to perform, and for the Company’s audiences to see, but it offers those 30 artists an individual mentoring plan, a budget for their work and a level of creative support that they will not previously have experienced.

This ground-breaking initiative has been developed and overseen by a Creative Consortium; a panel of experts drawn from across the world of ballet supporting the selection of creative talent, as well as overseeing mentoring opportunities and the on-going success of the programme.

Read the full article in The Wonderful World of Dance.

Lake Country Calendar: Ballet Kelowna’s Spring fuses fairy tale with comic heroes

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By Sydney Morton

2 May 2019

Ballet Kelowna is closing its season with Spring.

A mixed program that features three re-imagined classics from Canadian female choreographers; Petrushka by Heather Dotto, Amber Funk Barton’s Firebird and Rite of Spring by Ballet Kelowna’s artistic director, Simone Orlando. Then it will conclude with Spring from one of Canada’s emerging talents, Alysa Pires.

When approaching her recreation of Firebird, Funk Barton deconstructed Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 piece by remaining the heroine.

“In my version instead of point shoes and being ethereal, my Firebird is grounded and athletic. It’s a totally different aesthetic,” said Funk Barton.

“It was inspired by an old Russian fairy tale and I was thinking about what are our fairy tales now. They are comic books and star wars and DC those are our fairy tales so how do I make it contemporary and still keep its classical essence… to me the Firebird is a combination of The Flash and Mystique. She is almost what is referred to as a meta-human.”

Funk Barton also changed the ending, in the original she said that the Firebird’s magic is taken from her however in this version she gives it up to help people.

Read the full article in the Lake Country Calendar.

Laurent Liotardo/The English National Ballet

The Guardian: She Persisted review – a fine rebalance

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By Lisa Allardice

14 April 2019

In 2016 Tamara Rojo, artistic director of English National Ballet, set out to redress the shocking realisation that in 20 years as a professional dancer she had never performed in a work by a woman. She commissioned She Said, a programme of exclusively female choreographers, now followed by She Persisted (the feminist slogan adopted after the notorious 2017 Republican putdown of US politician Elizabeth Warren).

What better way to open a showcase of female creativity than with the return of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings, an exuberant portrayal of the troubled life of Frida Kahlo? In an impressive debut, Katja Khaniukova brings a winning combination of vulnerability and defiance to the central role (danced by Rojo in its 2016 premiere), as we follow Kahlo from mischievous schoolgirl to her tempestuous marriage to Diego Rivera, played as a bumbling, middle-aged lothario by Irek Mukhamedov.

Mexican skeletons, male dancers in the flamboyant dresses of her self-portraits, dancing monkeys and deers speared with arrows – comic touches capture the surreal playfulness of Kahlo’s art alongside the darker incidents of her story: the bus accident she suffered in her teens and the terrible injuries and miscarriages she endured as a result, all imaginatively and harrowingly suggested. The whole is both sexy and sad.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: Bausch, Forsythe, Van Manen review – a company awakening

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By Luke Jennings

26 March 2019

In the five years since she was made artistic director of English National Ballet, Tamara Rojo has remade the company, introducing challenging new work and promoting a new generation of soloists and principals. Her latest programme offers pieces by three of the 20th century’s most influential choreographers: William Forsythe, Hans van Manen and Pina Bausch. ENB are the first British company to perform Le Sacre du printemps(The Rite of Spring) by Bausch, a notable coup for Rojo.

The triple bill will run at Sadler’s Wells until Saturday, and the fact that it is not playing outside London is a reminder of the hard economics underpinning a major-scale ballet company. At ENB, the books are balanced by touring classical story ballets such as Le Corsaire and Coppélia, and by a long winter Nutcracker season. So it’s good to see the dancers cutting loose in less traditional fare. It’s clearly liberating for them, but evenings like this also offer audiences the chance to see company members in a different context. Dancers who might spend most of their year performing as part of the ensemble, as pirates in Le Corsaire or Rhineland villagers in Giselle, can find themselves suddenly and strikingly foregrounded. Ballet careers are all about seizing the moment, about taking the chance when it presents itself.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: At the Heart of Gold: how ‘predatory’ institutions protected Larry Nassar

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By Brian Armen Graham

3 May 2019

For more than two decades, Larry Nassar used his position as an osteopathic physician at Michigan State University and longtime doctor for the United States’ women’s gymnastics team to molest at least 250 women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. The manipulation ran so deep that his victims for years believed there was nothing to report. In many of the cases the abuse happened while a parent was in the room, a tragic detail that offers an alarming metaphor of how blind we can be. It was literally happening in front of our eyes.

Not until a former gymnast named Rachael Denhollander became the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar in September 2016 – more than a year before #MeToo and the tipping point of a society’s reckoning with sexual assault – were Nassar’s many victims emboldened to break their silence. Denhollander’s courage encouraged more survivors to come forward, including Olympic champions and household names like Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber, until the trickle became a deluge, generating the momentum necessary to bring a pillar of the community to justice – and not without initially severe public backlash.

This, the biggest sexual abuse scandal in US sports history, is the subject of At the Heart of Gold, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary that airs on HBO after premiering at this year’s Tribeca film festival. On the surface, the blend of archival footage and talking head interviews with current and former female gymnasts doesn’t offer a whole lot that hasn’t previously come to light. Nassar’s grooming techniques had already been recounted in stomach-turning detail during his trial, while the many institutional failures that enabled the abuse were laid out exhaustively in the Ropes & Gray independent report commissioned by the US Olympic Committee in the aftermath. None of the big-name Olympians who spoke out against Nassar in court last year participated in the filming.

And yet the 88-minute film succeeds where mainstream media too often failed as the story unfolded, making full use of its feature-length canvas in pulling together the many complex threads of a story that was always bigger, and more sinister, than a single monster.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

New York Times: At City Ballet, Two Cheers for Pam Tanowitz

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(And 2 more for Brian Seibert)

By Brian Seibert

3 May 2019

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk of a “new era” or “new chapter” at New York City Ballet. At the company’s spring gala at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, both phrases cropped up in preshow speeches by the new artistic director, Jonathan Stafford, and the new associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan. These speeches were far from lively, but fresh ideas have been emerging in other forms. The fruit of one was on the program: a commission for the choreographer Pam Tanowitz.

For many years, especially as ballet companies came under increasing pressure to identify and nurture female choreographers, City Ballet’s failure to call upon Ms. Tanowitz was puzzling. It’s true that she’s an outsider to ballet, but she knows her ballet history, and her proven talent in discovering drama and wit through formal invention puts her right in line with the company’s best traditions.

So it’s about time that she be given a shot. Yet, as it turns out, the commission is also a little ahead of schedule. Originally, the plan was for Ms. Tanowitz to make a work for the fall, but when another choreographer pulled out, Ms. Tanowitz — suddenly in-demand and busier than ever before in her career — stepped in.

Might that fast-forwarding account for why her new “Bartok Ballet” feels both overstuffed and undercooked? Its plentiful virtues are characteristic, starting with a wonderfully multidimensional use of stage space. In this ensemble piece, two dancers might oscillate in and out of a relationship intermittently identifiable as a duet, while someone else, way in the rear, lies on her back, raising a bent leg, and yet another dancer peeks out from a forward wing.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

WWD: New York City Ballet Gala Seen as Turning Point for Change

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By Misty White Sidell

3 May 2019

The New York City Ballet held its annual spring gala on Thursday evening — the first to be presided over by a new leadership administration.

In late February, Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan — both former principal dancers at the company — were named as artistic director and associate artistic director, respectively. Stafford had been serving as interim director since June 2018, when his predecessor Peter Martins resigned amid allegations of abuse, following a 35-year run at the head of the historical troupe.

This passing of the baton — only the third such change in City Ballet’s 71-year history — was embroiled in scandals relating to male dancers’ and administrations’ conduct. Thus, the company — known in recent years for its flashy artist and fashion design collaboration — appears to be taking a quiet moment to reassess. Its gala last night was not attended by celebrities and the company has no imminent plans for an international tour.

In the weeks since their appointment, Stafford and Whelan have been outlining plans to modernize the company. As previously outlined to WWD, Stafford intends to implement new protocols to ensure that the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet becomes increasingly diverse, thus providing the company with a class of dancers that better reflects the outside world. Whelan, the company’s first female director, hopes to make City Ballet a sanctuary for female choreographers and reverse years of patriarchal rule.

Read the full article in WWD.

The Guardian: The White Crow review – Ralph Fiennes brings poise to ballet biopic

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By Peter Bradshaw

20 March 2019

The White Crow is a watchable, serviceable movie telling the story of ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev and his sensational escape to the west in the early 60s at the age of 23, while on his first European tour. Dance is represented as a transcendental experience of success, of leaving behind the past and reinventing the future. Like Billy Elliot’s defection from his working-class childhood, Nureyev’s flight involves crises of loyalty with family and community. These struggles are, however, a little enigmatic and opaque with Rudolf, as portrayed by the Ukrainian ballet star and first-time actor Oleg Ivenko. Ralph Fiennes directs and gives a performance of spaniel-eyed sadness as Nureyev’s dance teacher and mentor Alexander Pushkin, with whose wife Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova), Nureyev is to have a sentimental education.

David Hare adapts Julie Kavanagh’s biography of Nureyev, skilfully sketching in his past life via flashbacks of childhood and early manhood as a tempestuous young student in Leningrad. The present-tense action takes place in Paris, as Nureyev and the west thrill each other to the bone. Nureyev finds a well-connected Parisian ally in Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos), whom the film promotes almost to quasi-girlfriend status, while representing Nureyev’s gay identity pretty obliquely compared with his straight experiences with Xenia. Finally at the airport, Nureyev realises it’s now or never. He has to defect.

Read the article in The Guardian.

New York Times: The Choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Dance Card Is Overflowing

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By Gia Kourlas

1 May 2019

This spring, no one has asked more of Pam Tanowitz than Pam Tanowitz. She is making more dances than she ever has in her life.

“I’m nervous, and I’m worried, and I stay up at night,” she said in a recent interview at New York City Ballet, where she was rehearsing her latest. “I have so many steps in my head.”

That’s fitting. A modern dance choreographer, Ms. Tanowitz, 49, has a flair for inventing sophisticated steps then turning them inside out. While she may appear to be her usual wisecracking self — she told her City Ballet dancers to “do it quickly again before I get arrested,” referring to the company’s tight rehearsal schedule — she fully grasps the pressure of her situation.

Her approach is to take it one dance at a time. First came a new work for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Next was one for Paul Taylor’s troupe — that will have its premiere in June, along with her first outdoor site-specific piece, conceived with Sara Mearns, the City Ballet principal. Later this month, Ms. Tanowitz will unveil another new work at the Kennedy Center in Washington as part of Ballet Across America, featuring members of both Dance Theater of Harlem and Miami City Ballet. Then there’s her company’s coming tour to London to present “Four Quartets,” her acclaimed work inspired by the T.S. Eliot poems.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Ashley Bouder at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU

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As a 2019 Resident Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, Ashley Bouder will be exploring gender fluidity in the pas de deux. The Center wrote:

Gender Fluidity in the Pas de Deux

At The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, Bouder will create choreography for a film that will showcase ballet’s potential to demonstrate gender fluidity. Although we associate the pas de deux with a male/female identity, Bouder wonders what would transpire if we stripped away gender and made the dance about the connection of two people in a specific place and time.

Bouder, a strong advocate for women in dance, founded the Ashley Bouder Project, which “actively recruits women and marginalized individuals to give them voices in creative and leadership roles in the dance and arts world.”

Learn more about the Ashley Bouder Project here.

Learn more about The Center for Ballet and the arts at NYU here.