Tag Archives: 2013

Woody Allen injects humor into the ballet

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The ballet isn’t generally known as a place for great humor, but Woody Allen was a cutup at the Youth America Grand Prix Gala, spies said. The “Annie Hall” director and wife Soon-Yi Previn were spotted there as guests at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center last week, along with David and Julia Koch, Wilbur and Hilary Ross, Debra Black and Karen LeFrak, who composed the score for a premiere of Marcelo Gomes’ dance piece “Tous Les Jours.” When the well-heeled group filed in for dinner after the performance, Allen was seen desperately scanning the place cards at his table. “I like it when Soon-Yi’s at the same table,” he explained to a guest, relieved to find she was seated nearby. When a party photographer asked to snap a pic, Allen quipped that he’s always happy to pose because, “It keeps me from eating.” And when a guest exclaimed Allen hadn’t changed since they’d met 35 years before, the director put his hand on his heart, tapped his chest and concluded, “No maturity.” [Source]

Opening Friday April 19th, the San Jose Ballet in Merce Cunningham’s “Duets”

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Here is a Nathaniel Tileston photo from the original cast–Merce dancing with Cathy Kerr in 1980.

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Another photo of “Duets,” having its San Jose Ballet premiere this weekend–Here are American Ballet Theatre’s Robert La Fosse and Christine Spizzo in 1982.

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Martin Chaix – „We were right here!!“ (Premiere tonight)

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The title of the first choreography by Martin Chaix for Ballett am Rhein takes us straight into the ballet studio. On the day of his arrival in Düsseldorf in the autumn of 2009 the dancer and choreographer discovered on the wall of the ballet room the written words. “we were right here!! at the right time”. In the concept of the piece Martin Chaix tells how he stands to the words, which gave him repeated food for thought, whether lurking behind something or catching his eye directly. A reflection based on the localization and apprehension of an anchorage in here and now, making a reference back to the past and a perspective forward to the future from this anchorage. An attempt at the theme of the omnipresence of change and, now fearful and now joyful, our dealings with it.

The aspect of change and the question of self-localization also brought Martin Chaix to Alfred Schnittke and his concerto for choir, the first movement of which supplies him with the music for his world première. Schnittke as a strayer among religions and cultures, a searcher for his own identity, seemed to him the ideal musical counterpart. Besides, the immediacy of choir singing, which is made of tones produced solely by the human body, suggested to Martin Chaix an affinity with dance, which “presupposes the presence of the human body, the mere fact of being there”.

French-born Martin Chaix was trained at the ballet school of the Opéra National de Paris and after his studies joined the ensemble there under Brigitte Lefèvre. In 2006 he moved to the Leipzig ballet as soloist under Paul Chalmer. His first choreographies were for the Pariser opera in 2006, and for Leipzig there followed in 2007 “Lady”, “Lob der Tränen” (in praise of tears), “Und so weiter …” (and so on) and then in 2010 for the Noverre Society in Stuttgart “Voices”. He has been a member of Ballett am Rhein since 2009.

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“WE WERE RIGHT HERE” (World Première)
Martin Chaix

MUSIC
1st movement of the concerto for choir by Alfred Schnittke




[Source]