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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

New York Times: When a Ballet Director Was Fired, Dance Stars Rallied. Or Did They?

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By Alex Marshall

20 February 2020

Some of the dance world’s biggest names threatened to withdraw work from the repertoire of the Lyon Opera Ballet — a major French company — this week unless it reinstated its former artistic director.

“This is with a heavy heart,” they wrote in an open letter published in Libération, a major newspaper in France. But, they added, they saw “no other solutions.”

Yorgos Loukos, the Lyon company’s artistic director since 1991, was fired this month after a French court found him guilty of discriminating against a dancer. Mr. Loukos had refused to give the dancer a contract when she returned from maternity leave.

The Lyon Opera Ballet’s decision to fire him was “incomprehensible and arbitrary,” said the letter, which called on the French government to intervene.

The letter — in which stars appeared to hold a company to ransom — contained the signatures of around 100 people, including Benjamin Millepied, William Forsythe, and the European choreographers Jiri Kylian and Mats Ek. Sylvie Guillem, the French ballet star who retired in 2015, was listed as a signatory, as was the actress Isabelle Huppert.

But when The New York Times contacted some of the letter’s signees for comment, several disavowed it.

“I was asked to sign, but declined, because the letter spoke to internal matters of the theater of which I have no direct experience or knowledge, and I do not agree with the coercive tactics,” Mr. Forsythe said in an email.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

Pointe: Ingrid Silva Stars in New Nike Video Series Celebrating Black History Month (Plus, Serena Williams Narrates)

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By Chava Lansky


Yesterday, the first of Nike’s new Common Thread video series dropped, and we were thrilled to see that it featured dancers; namely, Dance Theatre of Harlem member (and June/July 2017 Pointe cover star) Ingrid Silva, and Florida-based ballet student Alex Thomas. Even better, it’s narrated by tennis phenom Serena Williams. This series of short videos celebrates Black History Month by focusing on representation in sport. (We’re not crazy about ballet being called a sport, but we’ll let it slide.) In each installment, athletes united by a common thread discuss their passion, and the lack of role models they saw in their fields while growing up.

Interspersed with gorgeous dance footage, Silva and Thomas tell each other their stories. Silva talks about growing up in Brazil, and how it wasn’t until she moved to New York to train at DTH that she saw dancers who looked like her. Thomas discusses the loneliness he felt as the only dancer of color in his childhood studio. “Representation matters, and you can’t become something you don’t see,” says Silva, who later adds, “Directors have to take the first step in hiring dancers of color, so the stage looks like what the rest of the world looks like.”

Watch this inspirational video below now!

Read the full post on Pointe’s blog.

Joffrey Ballet Winning Works Brings In 2 Women and 2 Men Choreographers

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Learn more from Joffrey Ballet.

The Guardian: The Cellist review – a joyfully giddy tribute to Jacqueline du Pré

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By Lyndsey Winship

18 February 2020

Jacqueline du Pré danced with her cello. In concert footage, her body sighs and sways as her music soars. But it’s a leap from lyrical presence on the podium to transposing Du Pré’s tragically short life into dance, a challenge taken up by choreographer Cathy Marston in her first main stage commission for the Royal Ballet.

The Cellist comes in a double bill with Jerome Robbins’ 1969 Dances at a Gathering – Chopin piano, dreamy pastels, choreography of conversational nuance and lovely, subtle dancing – but it’s Marston’s ingenuity we’re all here to see. She is bold in having a dancer (Marcelino Sambé) embody the cello itself, kneeling in front of Du Pré (a radiant Lauren Cuthbertson), arm raised like the neck of the instrument as the cellist draws her hand across the air holding an invisible bow.

This picture spirals off into something more expansive, but they return to the motif. Mostly it seems to work, although there are cumbersome moments of pas de deux, not least due to the awkwardness of the cellist’s wide-legged stance. But there’s also the easy flow of bodies entwined, the way artist, instrument and music become one.

Composer Philip Feeney weaves extracts from Du Pré’s rep into his score and Marston has Du Pré and conductor Daniel Barenboim (Matthew Ball) fall in love on the concert stage, locking eyes over Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Aware of the music’s importance, Marston crowds the scene, with the imperious Ball dancing off the podium, an orchestra of dancers rising and falling and Cuthbertson changing from bright innocent girl to woman in love as we watch. It’s arguably an overload, although more generally the whirlwind of motion evokes exactly the giddy joy and genius shown in Christopher Nupen’s film The Trout, featuring Du Pré and Barenboim in their youthful prime.

Read the full review in The Guardian.

The Atlantic: Classical Music Has a ‘God Status’ Problem

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By Ashley Fetters, J. Clara Chan, and Nicholas Wu

Sarah Hubbard knew something was off about her interactions with a piano professor at the Berklee College of Music—they had a “haunting and unsettling” quality, she remembers. Hubbard, who studied violin at Berklee until she graduated in 2016, remembers that sometimes when they crossed paths, he seemed to be “deliberately trying to prolong” their interaction, and sometimes the professor, Bruce Thomas, gave her hugs that felt awkward. Sometimes he would show up near where she was, Hubbard says, lingering just at the periphery of her vision and then emailing her that he’d seen her that day but she’d seemed too busy to say hello. He sent her emails late at night, she says, and once when she didn’t respond promptly, he approached her boyfriend on campus to tell him to tell Hubbard to return his email. (Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.)

Hubbard frequently worried, as she moved around campus, about surprise encounters with Thomas, who had been teaching at the school for some three decades and occasionally composed music that her student ensemble played. When they were in the same music-department building at the same time, she’d plan escape routes: “Well, I at least can outrun this guy on stairs if I run into him; I can zoom past him. But I can’t do anything in an elevator,” she remembers thinking.

It got to the point where Hubbard had trouble focusing on her music—the reason why she’d come to Berklee in the first place. But she worried that things could “blow up in [her] face” if she reported his actions to Berklee’s leadership. “A lot of these encounters, they scream inappropriate, but they don’t scream, like, You’ve broken a rule in our handbook,” Hubbard says. So instead, she mentioned her discomfort to a faculty member she trusted, one of her student ensemble’s advisers, who she believes spoke to Thomas on her behalf—and quietly discouraged Hubbard from auditioning for any solos that, should she be assigned them, would require her to rehearse one-on-one with him.

Still, he always seemed to be close by, and Hubbard says he once cornered her in an elevator, demanding that she apologize for speaking up about his behavior.

Read the full article here.

Chicago Tribune: Review: The Joffrey’s new ‘Times Are Racing’ is great, except for the fluff piece ‘Commedia’

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By Lauren Warnecke

Remember that scene in the movie “Footloose?” The one where Kevin Bacon drives into a warehouse in his VW bug, pulls a cassette tape out of the glove box, drinks a beer and dances like heck? I don’t know if Justin Peck was thinking about Kevin Bacon when he made “The Times Are Racing” for the New York City Ballet — after all, he wasn’t even born when that movie came out — but Peck, NYCB’s resident choreographer, captured something similar to that pent-up anger that drove Bacon to dance.

“The Times Are Racing” saw its Joffrey premiere on a mixed-rep program of the same name, through Feb. 23 at the Auditorium Theatre.

Dancer Edson Barbosa bounded across the stage — airborne more frequently than his feet, shod with white high-top sneakers, were on the ground — in tank top and jeans, sweat flying from his brow. But unlike Kevin Bacon in that warehouse, Barbosa isn’t alone. “The Times Are Racing” isn’t about getting out personal frustration; rather, it’s about how a collective of people can band together to create change in the world.

“The Times Are Racing” opens with a single dancer huddled by the company. Barbosa’s solo becomes a tap-dance inspired duet with Greig Matthews. A stunning pas de deux for Jeraldine Mendoza and Dylan Gutierrez (who gives the best performance of his career) repeats pretzel-like intricacies, mimicking the cumulative rise in energy that builds within selections from Dan Deacon’s iterative electronic score called “America.”

Dancing in sneakers affords these dancers the freedom to execute Peck’s larger-than-life choreography with reckless abandon, jumping higher and reaching farther than they could in their ballet slippers. They’re dressed in street clothes which give off an early 1990s vibe (styled by Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony), but this is not a Gen X ballet. There’s an underbelly to “The Times Are Racing” that speaks directly to today’s deeply divided political landscape. That’s not to say millennials and Gen Z-ers are the only ones to experience political division. But Peck choreographed the piece during the 2016 presidential election — which is why it’s important to point out that this piece is actually not at all like “Footloose.” It’s not just virtuosic; it’s deeply personal to those dancers on stage. Of course, no Peck ballet is without commitment to technique and form, so any sense of cacophony is tempered by clean, crisp lighting by Peck’s frequent collaborator Brandon Sterling Baker, tightly organized formations and a blending of grounded pedestrianism from the waist down with perfectly balletic upper bodies.

Read the full review online here.

The New York Times: The Unhealthy Math of Skinny + Pretty = Good

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A young woman struggling with an eating disorder tries to shift from self-loathing to self-loving.

By Lauren Covalucci

I always liked myself better for what I could be than for what I was — especially when it came to my body.

This started at age 3 in dance class, where the other girls, unlike me, had thin arms and legs. The other girls’ tights, unlike mine, didn’t dig into their waists like a pink belt around teddy bear fluff. Their cheeks didn’t glow red after class. They could do splits.

By the time I was 13, my body had stretched and thinned, leading my teacher to say, “You finally look like a dancer.” Ten years of childhood passion couldn’t get me there, but puberty did.

Nine years later, once puberty had run its course, I learned that I could accomplish a similarly magical transformation by simply not eating.

Thinking back on that time now feels like waking from a nightmare: bolting upright at 4 a.m., blinking and breathing as you try to reorient yourself to reality and reconcile the things you did in dreams with the person you are awake. This is how I give context to memories like the time, nearly five years ago, when I started a loud public fight with my college boyfriend because he had bought me a slice of pizza on a Saturday night.

My argument went like this: “I said I didn’t want a slice of pizza. I can’t just not eat pizza if I don’t want it. It’s not that easy. You never listen to me. You don’t even respect me enough not to buy me a slice of pizza. When I say no, I mean no.”

Yes, that’s really what I said.

I can’t explain to him what happened because we don’t speak anymore. The breakup was unsurprisingly messy, borne of our emotional mismatch — his optimism (“Can’t you just be happy?”) versus my depression (“That’s not how it works.”). One night, as our hurtful exchanges snowballed, he went for the jugular: “You’ve gained weight.”

Love may feel intolerably complex at 22, but one emotional equation, for me, was starkly simple: skinny + pretty = good.

Read the rest of the story here.

Pointe: Onstage This Week: Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Frida” at Dutch National Ballet, Atlanta Ballet Gets Jazzy, and More!

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By Chava Lansky


Wonder what’s going on in ballet this week? We’ve rounded up some highlights.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Explores the Life of Frida Kahlo for Dutch National Ballet

In 2016, prolific choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa created Broken Wings for English National Ballet, a short piece diving into the life of iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Soon after, Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen offered her the chance to expand that work into a full-length ballet. The result, simply titled Frida, makes its premiere February 6-25 in Amsterdam.

In collaboration with British composer Peter Salem and Dutch designer Dieuweke van Reij, Ochoa’s ballet explores Kahlo’s fraught relationship with artist Diego Rivera, her bisexuality, the physical and emotional pain she endured and the way that she crafted her own image through her paintings. Dutch National Ballet has put out a series of YouTube videos exploring the creation of the piece; catch the first one above.

Atlanta Ballet Presents Three Jazzy Company Premieres

Atlanta Ballet celebrates the rhythms and energy of jazz music this week in Heart/Beat: Gospel, Brubeck & Rhythms of the City, a triple bill of company premieres. The program, running February 7-15, includes Lar Lubovitch’s Elemental Brubeck to the music of Dave Brubeck, Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet to compositions by Mikael Karlsson and Victor Feldman, and Dwight Rhoden’s Sunrise Divine to an original score by Kevin Johnson.

Read the full article here.

The Straits Times: Lyon Ballet chief sacked for firing dancer after maternity leave

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Agence France-Presse

PARIS- The director of a French ballet has been sacked for firing a dancer after she had a baby, the French culture ministry confirmed last Friday.

The unions had called for Greek-born Yorgos Loukos to go after he lost his appeal over discrimination against dancer Karline Marion, who was 34 at the time.

He was ordered to pay Marion €5,000 (S$7,600) in compensation.

Loukos, 69, who had been director of the Lyon Ballet for 33 years, was fired last Thursday.

Like the vast majority of ballerinas in France, Marion was on a temporary contract during her five years at the ballet.

Read the full story here.

Daily Beast: Inside Female Directors’ Push for Better Parental Leave—in the DGA and Across Hollywood

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By Laura Bradley

When Flint Town director Jessica Dimmock first decided to urge the Directors Guild of America to change its parental leave policies, one dim worry crept into the back of her mind: What if she was starting this battle only for herself? What if she was the only person who had lost health insurance because having a baby made it impossible for her to meet the minimum income requirement to stay on the plan? “In my gut I knew this wasn’t going to be the case,” Dimmock told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “But there was a slight moment where I was like, ‘Huh, maybe this doesn’t happen to people and I’m just super inefficient, or…’ I don’t know.” 

Once the campaign launched, however, a flood of responses confirmed Dimmock was not alone in this frustration—not remotely. “And they weren’t just the DGA,” Dimmock said. “They were also from the Writers Guild, they were also from producers, they were also from people that are part of [the Screen Actors Guild].”

For coverage under the DGA’s health insurance—a separate entity called the DGA-Producer Health Plan, which is jointly administered by the guild and producer associations representing the film, TV, and commercial production industries—members must surpass a minimum income threshold from directing guild projects within a 12-month period. Having a baby complicates that task for obvious reasons—and as a result, after Dimmock gave birth in 2017, she lost her guild insurance. She switched to COBRA, which carries higher premiums, at a time when she needed to visit the doctor more often than ever. Dimmock’s directing partner, the baby’s father, lost his insurance for a quarter but, she noticed, was also not as intensely impacted overall.

And so last summer, once Dimmock was back on her feet and directing once more, she decided to explore what she might do. By December, she had gathered dozens of signatures on a letter calling for new parents to be granted extensions to the time period required to meet their minimums, which she presented to the Eastern Council Board. The proposition extends to all new parents, including those who have adopted.

“They were receptive and they said, ‘We’d like to explore this,’” Dimmock said of the council’s reaction, “but there was nothing else that happened.” Dimmock took her campaign public in January ahead of the DGA’s national board meeting in the hopes of keeping the pressure on. But that gathering came and went. The path forward at this point is unclear; she has received no next-steps. 

Read the full article here.