Angela

The competitors for the next Erik Bruhn Prize are online here: https://national.ballet.ca/Productions/The-Erik-Bruhn-Prize It takes place on March 25 at Toronto.

How young are you?? Everybody fell for him during that Center Stage summer... 🤩😀 God, that was decades ago.

Yes, that's strange, it started with the pandemic. The start times are fixed around two months before, they have to finetune with the playhouse next to the opera house so that both start at a different time, I guess. Ballet normally starts at 19.30, sometimes 19.00, very very rarely at 20.00 CET. Matinees start at 14.00 CET.

A little bit prior to two months before the event, that would be at the beginning of May. Booking by telephone, at the box office and online starts exactly two months before, same date, advance booking by email or letter starts some days before that, so that you should know if you have tickets BEFORE the online sale starts. If you did not book the gala, which will be difficult to get tickets for, but Remember Me, Cranko School or Shrew, and you booked last year already, I guess you should get tickets. But I can't promise. I don't know when the Stuttgart booking system got this complicated... 🙄 https://www.staatstheater-stuttgart.com/tickets_service/booking-information/

Or maybe the students already have a job at the Royal Ballet and don't need the stress to do a competition.

Why is Alina Somova among the dancers??? Will the Mariinsky let her dance at such an event? Will they let her out of the country? Will the Ukrainian dancers get on stage with her? At Wiesbaden, Germany, Ukrainian musicians refuse to appear with Anna Netrebko - I know that Somova is not Netrebko, but her name seems very odd in that gala.

I understand now, Lusodancer, thank you - there are some education programmes that call themselves junior company and take money, and on the other hand there are junior companies that pay money to their dancers. The junior companies I listed pay their dancers - I can't guarantee for all, but certainly most of them. The German ones do, NDT also. Some of them even pay what the corps de ballet dancers of the main company earn. These junior companies tour and they commission new creations for their performances. Their purpose is to supply the main company with new dancers, maybe to "park" dancers there who cannot be accepted yet in the main company, to make tours to venues where the main company cannot perform, many of them do education programmes for a younger audience, they visit schools or nursing homes etc. NDT II for example is a full-fledged touring company with some 20 dancers, with works by the same choreographers as NDT I and gorgeous young talents. I'm not so sure if all the others that you mention really call themselves "junior company" - Nacho Duato's doesn't, it's called Nacho Duato Academy or Trainee Program, the one at The Hague is called Royal Conservatoire Dance Ensemble, which gives you a hint that it may not be paid. Others like Antwerp really use the name junior company, the Europaballett at Austria really looks like a ballet company. So it is tricky to make the difference, I now see. I guess we can say as a general rule that if it has a "2" or "II" in the name, it seems to be legitimate.

These are a few of the more important Junior Companies - some have closed, mostly because of lacks of funding. Ailey II – founded in 1974 NDT II – founded in 1978 Introdans Educatief/Introdans Ensemble for Youth 1989-?? Hubbard Street 2 – 1997-2017 ABT Studio Company/ABT II – founded in 1995 Groupe 13 (Béjart Ballet) – 1999-2001 Compania Nacional de Danza II (Spain) – 1999-2010 Zurich Juniors – founded in 2001 Bayerisches Junior Ballett München – founded in 2010 Bundesjugendballett (Hamburg Ballet) – founded in 2011 Dutch National Junior Company – founded in 2013 Could you name some of these companies, Lusodancer? Most ballet companies I know hire their new dancers directly from the acadamies, so I think you are talking about the more modern companies or companies with fewer dancers?

Alison, I haven't seen it, it had disappeared from the repertory for a long time. Apparently is has a Rose and a Thorn instead of the Lilac Fairy and Carabosse, the Prince is a modern young man in jeans who gets lost in the woods and finds himself in Aurora's time. There are some pieces of Petipa's choreography left, but most of the choreography is by Neumeier, I think. And it has a 80 meter long moving panorama for the panorama scene, beautifully designed by Jürgen Rose.

The casting for John Neumeier's version of Sleeping Beauty at Hamburg: Aurora - Ida Praetorius (27./29.1.) + Madoka Sugai (1./3.2.) Désiré - Alexandr Trusch (27./29.1.) + Alessandro Frola (1./ 3.2.) The Rose - Anna Laudere + Xue Lin (same dates as above) The Thorn - Karen Azatyan + Matias Oberlin Catalabutte - Christopher Evans + Alexandr Trusch Florine - Xue Lin + Ida Praetorius King Florestan - Florian Pohl + Edvin Revazov The Queen Hayley Page + Anna Laudere

Alina Cojocaru will dance in Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias in Venice, guesting with Hamburg Ballet, on 19. and 21. January at La Fenice. Her Armand Duval will be Alexandr Trusch.

Kunstkamer was the last work that longtime dancers and house choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot (he was also director of NDT) made for NDT, it premiered in December 2019 and was supposed to go on a big farewell tour in spring/summer 2020 to Paris, London, Madrid and Baden-Baden. All these international venus were cancelled due to the pandemic, and everybody thought the huge piece was lost forever, as the new NDT director Emily Molnar made a rather clean cut. Then David Hallberg came along... By the way, Paul Lightfoot is a British choreographer returning home with this piece. If you want to listen to the music of Kunstkamer, here is the old NDT website for the piece with a Spotify preview of all music pieces - scroll to the bottom: https://www.ndt.nl/en/agenda/kunstkamer/

Nanine Linning new artistic director Scapino Ballet Rotterdam Dutch choreographer Nanine Linning will be the new artistic director of Scapino Ballet Rotterdam. She succeeds Ed Wubbe who set the artistic course for thirty years. Ed Wubbe will remain with Scapino as artistic director until December 2024. Nanine Linning was already resident choreographer at Scapino from 2001 to 2006, after which she founded her own dance company. She will start in August 2024 alongside Ed Wubbe, who will step down at the end of December 2024. In the years 2023 and 2024 she will already be intensively involved in, among other things, developing the new four-year policy plan 2025 - 2028. Nanine Linning has gained international recognition over the past twenty years with her large multidisciplinary productions that combine dance and opera, design, fashion and visual art. With her strong visual language and explosive dance, she reaches a wide audience, which also follows her faithfully in the Netherlands. Performances such as Bacon, Requiem and Zero have received international acclaim. Nanine Linning works closely with various internationally renowned artists such as Teodor Currentzis, Alexandros Tsolakis, Yuima Nakazato, Alexey Retinsky and Studio Drift. Her collaborations with Iris van Herpen and Bart Hess led to exhibitions in several museums. From 2009 to 2018, Linning was artistic director of the dance companies of Theater Osnabrück and Theater und Orchester Heidelberg where she was also co-founder of a production house and a festival. Since then she has worked with companies such as Boston Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Bavarian State Opera and Ballet and musicaeterna, as well as with the Dutch National Touring Opera and the Netherlands Chamber Choir in collaboration with her own German dance company. Nanine Linning becomes the fifth artistic director in the 76-year existence of Scapino, the oldest dance company in the Netherlands. In 1945, Scapino was founded as a youth dance company by Ms. Hans Snoek. She was succeeded in 1970 by Armando Navarro, who introduced such major family performances as The Nutcracker and Pulcinella. After a two-year leadership by Nils Christe, Ed Wubbe became artistic director in 1993. Under Ed Wubbe's leadership, Scapino grew into a high-profile and innovative contemporary dance company. With his large-scale thematic productions in which he merged multiple disciplines, he enriched dance and managed to bring it to a large audience. In addition, he has given many young talents a prominent place in the company. Ed Wubbe created more than seventy choreographies for Scapino, including such successful pieces as Pearl, TING! and Oscar. Fatimazhra Belhirch, Chair of the Supervisory Board of Scapino Ballet Rotterdam: "With the appointment of Nanine, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam can start preparing for a new, exciting chapter in its nearly 80-year existence. The Supervisory Board is confident that Nanine, in close cooperation with the passionate and professional team of Scapino, will be able to further develop the position of the company in the city of Rotterdam and that the repertoire will attract many audiences on the many Dutch stages that Scapino visits every year. The international ambitions will also be further expanded under the leadership of Nanine Linning. The Supervisory Board is looking forward to working with Nanine." Nanine Linning: "I feel honored to write a new chapter in the history of this adventurous company. Thinking outside the box, collaborating with other disciplines and sensing the Zeitgeist are qualities of Scapino that I feel strongly connected to. I look forward to working in culturally vibrant Rotterdam and sharing our passion for the art of dance with a wide (inter)national audience." https://www.scapinoballet.nl/en/nanine-linning-new-artistic-director-scapino-ballet-rotterdam

And you don't know what you're going to miss.

At Stuttgart Ballet, the Italian dancer Martino Semenzato was promoted to Demi-Soloist. He graduated from the Académie Princesse Grace in Monte Carlo in 2018, then joined Stuttgart Ballet, which has the record number of nine male Demi-Soloists now, compared to eleven male corps de ballet dancers.

William Forsythe will donate his extensive archive to the ZKM Center for Art and Media at Karlsruhe, Germany. The archive covers William Forsythe’s entire creative period since the 1970s: from his time at the Stuttgart Ballet beginning in 1976, at the Ballet Frankfurt (1984–2004), and The Forsythe Company (2005–2015) to the present. It contains an extensive collection of archival video recordings of rehearsals, performances, and installations, as well as programs, posters, reviews, photographs, publications, correspondence, awards, and other documents. In the longer term, William Forsythe’s personal production notes will also be added to the archive. The ZKM Center for Art and Media is a museum of all media and genres, a house of both spatial arts such as painting, photography and sculpture and time-based arts such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater and performance. ZKM was founded in 1989 with the mission of continuing the classical arts into the digital age. This is why it is sometimes called “the electronic or digital Bauhaus”. With its select preliminary and posthumous collections from artists and theorists, it enables new insights and facilitates the deepening of knowledge about the intermedia arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. The long-term preservation of the valuable video holdings of the William Forsythe Archive is ensured by ZKM’s proven expertise in the field of audiovisual media as well as that of the ZKM Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems. https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/02/the-performative-archive-william-forsythe-and-peter-weibel-in-conversation

And I'm getting bored with the same old classics over and over. So do some of nowaday's dancers, who love to move in more than one style. What a blessing it must be to work with a choreographer who is making his/her dances on your body, on your personality! Think Sylvie Guillem, think Edward Watson, think Alina Cojocaru who works with John Neumeier all the time. Sometimes you see a whole different intensity in these dancers. I also think you should call it contemporary ballet, not contemporary dance - everything is developed from the classical language, not from free dance.

Kunstkamer is not a triple bill, it is a whole evening full-length work with huge corps de ballet scenes, made by the four choreographers. And it's GREAT. I'm sure David Hallberg will be dancing in it as he was in Australia.

A tribute from Zurich Ballet https://www.instagram.com/p/CnEgtllNZW1/

Yes, thank you Fiona - though she looks much older in the show, but that seems to be her. She seems to be a big talent, let's hope that she has decent teachers besides Tsiskaridze.

This is an ugly, cynical scene from the New Year's evening show on Russian State TV - does anybody recognize the ballerina in green who is sitting next to Tsiskaridze? Dear Mods: If this is too policital, please delete

Emma Ryott designed the costumes for almost all of Christian Spuck's ballets from his famous Lulu at Stuttgart until now, and often also the stage - that's why they look all the same after a while, to be honest. But Spuck never made The Seagull, I guess you mean his Anna Karenina, which he made for Zurich, before it was staged at Oslo, Bavarian State Ballet and the Stanislavsky.

We suddenly have a "Italian National Ballet" touring in Germany, the usual Nutcrackers and Swan Lakes for Christmas. Quite astonishing, I wonder if Roberto Bolle knows 🤔

Favourite ingredient? Drama, Baby.