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FYI
What's up in the dance community
A
Nutcracker Gift for Daddy
Meet Isabelle
Johnston, who for one delirious day was the Mouse That Roared
at The Washington Ballet.
Isabelle is a
7-year-old first-year student at The Washington School of
Ballet who played a baby-brother Mouse in the ballet’s
Nutcracker performances in December. Her proud father,
Frank Johnston, watched his daughter’s opening-night
performance, but it took a little doing: He was in Iraq at the
time. He’s a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, deployed as an
artillery officer in Fallujah.
“We had asked if we
could take a video clip of her on the stage and send it” to
Johnston, said Theresa Minni, Isabelle’s mother. Instead, The
Washington Ballet arranged with television station WRC NBC-4
to videotape the opening performance and forward the footage
to the Pentagon Channel, which broadcast it to U.S. servicemen
and women around the world—including a certain Marine officer
in Fallujah.
“We are thrilled to
give Lt. Col. Johnston the chance to see his daughter
onstage,” said Septime Webre, artistic director of The
Washington Ballet. “The Nutcracker is a beautiful
holiday story with a simple message that ‘anything is
possible.’ It is a privilege to share it with those serving
our country.”
On opening night,
Webre brought Isabelle onstage before the performance at
Washington’s Warner Theatre and read a statement from her
father: “I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to see a
new ‘first’ in the life of my daughter, Isabelle, while
deployed overseas. . . . I will watch this show as a father
but also as a representative for all the other fathers and
mothers deployed overseas this Christmas season that will miss
many other firsts—the first birth of a son or daughter, first
steps of a newborn, the first tooth of a growing child.”
Isabelle delivered a
statement of her own: “Hi, Daddy. I miss you. Enjoy the show."
Webre’s
Nutcracker is set in Washington, with King George III as
the bad-guy Rat King and George Washington as the heroic
Nutcracker, and there was cannon fire a-plenty in the battle
scene. Isabelle was easy to distinguish from her fellow mice
in Pilgrim garb: She wore a yellow ribbon around her hat.
Isabelle, who
enrolled in the ballet school to occupy herself after her
father was sent to Iraq, found something to smile at in her
star turn as a Mouse: “Daddy hates mice!” Well, not all of
them.
Dance Photos Hit the Road
A photo exhibition
starring the dance world’s top performers and
choreographers—coupled with their musings on what drives
them—is starting a national tour that will continue through
2010.
“The Dancer Within,”
by dance photojournalist Rose Eichenbaum, features 48 color
and black-and-white photographs of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Chita
Rivera, Tommy Tune, Ann Reinking, and other dance notables,
accompanied by excerpts from Eichenbaum’s interviews with the
artists. A companion book, The Dancer Within: Intimate
Conversations With Great Dancers, is to be published in
the spring by Wesleyan University Press.
“Visually, the
exhibition captures a moment in the life of a dancer,”
Eichenbaum says. “Viscerally, it reflects how dance speaks to
the social and cultural issues of our times and has the power
to express the deepest of human emotions.” The exhibition’s
first stop is the Ypsilanti [MI] District Library, from April
5 to June 1. The tour has been organized by the Smithsonian
Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and is sponsored by
United Dance Merchants of America (of which Rhee Gold is a
board member).
Eichenbaum is among
the dance world’s leading photographers; her work has appeared
in leading dance magazines and been widely exhibited. She is
also the author of The Number on My Grandfather’s Arm
and Masters of Movement: Portraits of America’s Great
Choreographers.
Final Farewells
Michael Kidd
Michael Kidd, the
endlessly inventive stage and movie choreographer who left his
mark on musicals from Guys and Dolls to Seven Brides
for Seven Brothers, died of cancer December 23, 2007, at
his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.
His work on Broadway
was honored with five Tony Awards: Finian’s Rainbow
(1947), Guys and Dolls (1951), Can-Can (1954),
Li’l Abner (1957), and Destry Rides Again
(1960). But Kidd had to wait until 1997 to receive an honorary
Academy Award for lifetime achievement for films he had
choreographed decades before.
“I always use
real-life gestures, and most of my dancing is based on real
life,” Kidd once told an interviewer. But Kidd’s “real life”
was more exciting than most people’s. His movie work was a
collection of indelible moments, from the manic energy of the
barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides (a tale of
country bumpkins that enlisted, among others, New York City
Ballet dancer Jacques d’Amboise) to the mystery and elegance
of Fred Astaire romancing Cyd Charisse in Central Park in
The Band Wagon.
Kidd was born Milton
Greenwald in Brooklyn in 1915, the son of an immigrant barber
from Russia. He won a scholarship to the School of American
Ballet in 1937 and later toured with Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet
Caravan before a stint as a soloist with what later became
American Ballet Theatre. In 1945 he created the ballet On
Stage! for the company.
He left the ballet
world for musicals in 1947, and Finian’s Rainbow was
his first Broadway venture. After his later success with
Guys and Dolls, Kidd shifted to Hollywood, where The
Band Wagon (1953) was his first big hit, followed by
Seven Brides a year later. He had doubts at first about
the latter movie: “Here are these slobs living off in the
woods,” he later told the Los Angeles Times. “They have
no schooling, they are uncouth, there’s manure on the floor,
the cows come in and out—and they’re gonna get up and dance?”
But he devised a convincing movement style for his love-crazed
rustics that was based on their everyday chores. The result
was one of Kidd’s biggest successes.
Kidd made his film
acting debut alongside Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey in It’s
Always Fair Weather (1955), a tale of three Army buddies.
Kelly, who co-directed with Stanley Donen, is said to have
ordered a solo by Kidd cut from the movie because he felt
threatened by it.
Kidd is survived by
his second wife, Shelah Hackett, a former dancer; two
daughters from his first marriage; and a son and daughter from
his second marriage.
Alberto Alonso
Alberto Alonso, who
co-founded the National Ballet of Cuba and choreographed the
evergreen Carmen Suite, died of heart failure December
31, 2007, in Gainesville, FL. He was 90.
Alonso studied
ballet in his native Havana, Cuba, before touring the world
with Col. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes. In 1940 he returned to
Cuba, where he founded the National Ballet with his brother,
Fernando, and Fernando’s wife, ballerina Alicia Alonso. Alonso
created his best-known work, Carmen Suite, in 1967 for
the Bolshoi’s Maya Plisetskaya.
Alonso defected to
the United States in 1993 and settled in Gainesville with his
third wife, actress and dancer Sonia Calero, who survives him
along with a son and two daughters.
Ernestine Stodelle
Ernestine Stodelle,
who performed with the early modern-dance company of Doris
Humphrey and Charles Weidman and decades later helped scholars
reconstruct their works, died January 5, 2008, in Santa
Barbara, CA. She was 95.
Stodelle, born
Ernestine Henoch in Oakland, CA, was the author of Deep
Song, a book about Martha Graham, and The Dance
Technique of Doris Humphrey. She also wrote dance reviews
and operated dance studios in Connecticut. She taught
technique workshops for more than 10 years for the Doris
Humphrey Society, according to the society’s website.
She is survived by
four children and two stepdaughters.
Jock Soto Documentary on PBS
More than three
decades ago, a 5-year-old boy born on a Navajo reservation in
New Mexico saw Edward Villella dance on television and
thought: That’s for me. In April, the story of that boy—known
to the world as Jock Soto, a former star of New York City
Ballet—will be told in a documentary, Water Flowing
Together, as part of the Independent Lens series on PBS.
At age 16, Soto was
chosen in 1981 by George Balanchine for the corps of New York
City Ballet, where he became a soloist in 1984 and a principal
the following year. Soto’s work with the company included
roles in many Balanchine works. He retired from dancing in
2005 but continues to teach at the School of American Ballet.
The documentary tracks Soto, son of a Navajo mother and Puerto
Rican father, as he rehearses for his farewell performance,
envisions his future, and travels to the reservation of his
birth and Puerto Rico to reconnect with his roots.
Water Flowing
Together (the title is the name of Soto’s Navajo clan) is
the first cinematic work by Gwendolen Cates, the author and
photographer of the book Indian Country. It’s scheduled
to be broadcast April 8; check your local listings.
Learning the Ropes of Dance Management
Hubbard Street Dance
Chicago is teaming up with the James S. Kemper Foundation and
five other arts organizations in the Chicago area to provide
mentored arts management internships for undergraduates.
Hubbard Street’s
Kemper Fellow will get exposure to development, marketing,
artistic administration, education, or finance, with a
concentration on one of those areas. “Undergraduate school is
often the best time to reach students who are still deciding
on a career path,” said Martin J. Grochala, Hubbard Street’s
director of development, in a news release.
The other arts
organizations involved are Chicago Chamber Musicians, Court
Theatre, Pegasus Players, the Ragdale Foundation (which
operates an artists’ retreat in Lake Forest, IL, near
Chicago), and Silk Road Theatre Project.
ABT Dancer Killed in Crash
A nine-vehicle
pileup on an icy New Jersey highway on December 2 claimed the
life of American Ballet Theatre dancer Jennifer Alexander, 35,
and seriously injured her husband of four months, fellow corps
de ballet member Julio Bragado-Young.
The dancers were
returning to New York in freezing rain from a Nutcracker
performance at the Williamsport Civic Ballet in Pennsylvania
when their car rammed into the pileup on Route 3 in East
Rutherford, NJ. Unhurt, they got out of the car. Alexander and
Bragado-Young were struck by separate vehicles as they stood
by their car, assistant prosecutor John Higgins of Bergen
County, NJ, told Dance Studio Life. Alexander was
pronounced dead at the scene; Bragado-Young, 28, suffered a
compound leg fracture. Their companions, Nicole Graniero, also
an ABT corps member, and Lindsay Poulis, 19, sustained
bruises.
Alexander, a native
of Calgary, Alberta, studied at the Alberta Ballet School and
the school of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. She danced with the
Royal Winnipeg Ballet from 1991 to 1993 and joined ABT in
1994. Bragado-Young, born in Cleveland, attended North
Carolina School of the Arts. It was unclear whether he would
be able to return to the ABT corps, “but we hope he will,”
says Kelly Ryan, the company’s director of press and public
relations.
ABT dedicated its
December performances of The Nutcracker at Washington’s
Kennedy Center to Alexander’s memory. The company also has
formed the Jennifer Alexander Memorial Fund, which will be
used to benefit the newly established Jennifer Alexander
Dancer, a senior female corps member. “In honor of our dear
friend and colleague, the title of Jennifer Alexander Dancer
will be bestowed annually upon one member of the corps de
ballet who best represents the professionalism, perseverance,
and generosity that Jennifer herself embodied,” said ABT
artistic director Kevin McKenzie. The first recipient is
Marian Butler, who joined ABT in 1995.
Kudos
* Lise la Cour,
director of the Ballet San Jose School, traveled to Copenhagen
in December to receive the Margot Lander Lifetime Achievement
Award from the Royal Danish Ballet. The Danish-born la Cour
served as associate ballet director with the Royal Danish
Ballet from 1988 to 1995 after her career as a soloist and
principal with the company. She took up her post in San Jose,
CA, in 2002.
* Celebrated tap
dancer Arthur Duncan will receive an honorary degree as
a Doctor of Performing Arts in American Dance from Oklahoma
City University at its commencement ceremony in May. He
previously received the 2005 Living Treasure in American Dance
Award from the university. Widely known from his television
appearances on The Lawrence Welk Show, Duncan has also
performed at Carnegie Hall and with symphony orchestras
nationwide.
* Gloria Govrin
became the school director of Minnesota Dance Theatre &
the Dance Institute, in Minneapolis, in September 2007. A
former dancer with New York City Ballet, Govrin opened her own
school, New Hope Ballet Academy in Pennsylvania, in the 1970s
and later taught at The Rock School. She was associate
artistic director of San Francisco Ballet School from 1999 to
2006.
* Pat Hon, a
member of Cornish College of the Arts’ dance faculty since
1978, will become the head of the dance department at the new
Singapore Arts School.
Above picture:
Former New York
City Ballet dancer Jock Soto, here with frequent partner Wendy
Whelan, is the subject of a PBS documentary, Water Flowing
Together.
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