Susan Jaffe appointed Director of ABT

[capybara]

Announced by Dance Europe.

[Bruce Wall]

What a wonderful and well deserved appointment.  

[MaddieRose]

The press release from ABT:

 

https://www.abt.org/susan-jaffe-named-artistic-director/

[alison]

Good news.  The best of luck to her.

[miliosr]

This news should come as a relief to the ABT faithful. Jaffe spent her entire performing career at ABT and she knows the company's repertory and ways well. She also held herself to high technical standards during her career so she will be unbendable on that point. The big question will be what she does with the roster she's about to inherit. Angel Corella took over the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia) Ballet and generated a raft of bad press for himself by dispensing with most of the then-current roster. My guess would be that Jaffe will move slowly and let retirements and departures present opportunities to her to shape the roster. We'll find out soon enough.

Edited May 10, 2022 by miliosr

[Sophoife]

That's an interesting comment @miliosr and relevant to recent social media mutterings around Australian Ballet. David Hallberg took over as AD in 2020-21 after David McAllister had been in role for 20 years, and doesn't appear to have made wholesale changes to the roster, most likely due to pandemic-related circumstances.

 

In the last two years the company has lost three male principals and a senior artist to retirement, with Callum Linnane, a senior artist for 9 months, having been promoted in February 2022. Last week the company announced Joseph Caley's hire as a principal plus two corps men (one ex-Mariinsky, the other from the School of American Ballet) and the FUSS! One idiot said it was Hallberg's ABT ties (er, no, SAB is the NYCB school), another his Bolshoi links (yes, um, they're not yet the same company), and one former principal (themself hired as a principal) said the company should be developing its own dancers - well, yes, all the current principals, male and female, are Australian-trained! When three RBS graduates (only one Australian) joined late last year there was barely a murmur. Six graduates of Australian Ballet School were hired at the end of last year.

 

I think a change in artistic directorship is a natural time for a change in company make-up. There's certainly already been a certain amount of movement at ENB even before a new AD has been appointed, also at SFB with the retirement of Helgi Tomasson and the arrival of Tamara Rojo. I just think the pandemic has made these inevitable changes slower at Australian Ballet.

 

Several long-serving corps members at ABT have recently moved on (remembering they only have the three ranks there) or into retirement; I'm sure there will be changes at ABT and I'm equally sure some will complain and some give change a fair chance.

[Jeannette]

11 hours ago, miliosr said:

This news should come as a relief to the ABT faithful. Jaffe spent her entire performing career at ABT and she knows the company's repertory and ways well. She also held herself to high technical standards during her career so she will be unbendable on that point. The big question will be what she does with the roster she's about to inherit. Angel Corella took over the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia) Ballet and generated a raft of bad press for himself by dispensing with most of the then-current roster. My guess would be that Jaffe will move slowly and let retirements and departures present opportunities to her to shape the roster. We'll find out soon enough.

Every change in management results in some staffing turnover - in every industry.

 

I am extremely relieved with Jaffe’s appointment. 😅 She’s just completing her first (and, as we now know, last) full post-COVID season as A.D. in Pittsburgh. Wonderful balanced programming…I loved the first mixed bill in October - Diamonds, G-P Classique, Helen Pickett’s masterpiece Petal! What’s more telling is her 8-year tenure as Dean of the Dance Faculty at North Carolina School for the Arts, in which she upheld classical training over all. No pandering to wokeism or ticking boxes…just cultivating  talent in a natural manner, allowing the very best to move to the top.

 

p.s. My secret wish is that she somehow find a way to bring the late Clark Tippett’s masterwork - Bruch Violin Concerto - back to the ABT repertoire….as there was some sort of squabble about that particular ballet between the Tippett heirs & the current ABT leadership. 
 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 10, 2022 by Jeannette
added note about Tippett’s ballet

[miliosr]

As I posted elsewhere, opportunities to shape the principals roster will present themselves to Susan Jaffe based on the march of time alone:

 

Gillian Murphy is 43.

Herman Cornejo turns 41 next week.

Misty Copeland turns 40 in September.

 

There's also a whole cohort of principals who are past 35: Isabella Boylston, Thomas Forster, Cory Stearns and James Whiteside.

 

The biggest problem for Jaffe will be one that is peculiar to ABT: The ratio of dancers developed in-house vs. guest stars. This has ever been the bane of ABT's existence as there's a faction within its audience that wants to see talent developed from within and there's another faction that wants to see guest stars from around the world holding forth "in the grand manner" at the Met. Getting that ratio right has always plagued ABT directors. Lucia Chase pursued the guest stars policy in the 1970s and that decade is rightly remembered as ABT's Golden Age. But her policy also caused morale problems at the corps and soloist levels. Mikhail Baryshnikov went in the opposite direction during the 1980s and he promoted talent from with. But there was a not inconsiderable part of the ABT audience that decried the Baryshnikov era with the charge of "There are no stars!" (a charge, by the way, which included Susan Jaffe). Kevin McKenzie did a fine job during the first half of his tenure by utilizing the talent he had inherited from Baryshnikov, going out into the free market and hiring talent, and developing talent from within. The second half of his tenure has been less successful in that regard and this resulted in some fairly serious morale problems at the company during the first half of the 2010s.

 

The secondary problem for Jaffe is what to do about replacing Irina Kolpakova as ballet mistress to the female principals once she is gone. Kolpakova will be 89 this month and, like the Queen of England, she isn't going to last forever. So, Jaffe will have that succession problem to contend with.

Edited May 10, 2022 by miliosr

[capybara]

Very interesting observations, @miliosr!

The home team/guest stars balance is an issue in many companies.

[Jeannette]

Jaffe inherits economic challenges. How will she balance a tight budget? Can ABT afford guest stars from overseas?…although we know that they won’t be coming directly from Russia any time soon…bad news for Kimin Kim fans, as he’s chosen to remain at the Mariinsky.

 

The $64-million question related to the tight budget is: Will/Can Alexei Ratmansky’s current contract as artist-in-residence be renewed next year? 

[Sophoife]

Clearly National Ballet of Canada is also on a tight budget, as all company references to new AD Hope Muir are as "Hope Muir, Joan and Jerry Lozinski Artistic Director".

[miliosr]

Today's Dance Links has a link to a blog post by Alastair Macaulay discussing women leading ballet companies. Part IV of the post addresses the challenges Susan Jaffe has ahead of her trying to bring coherence to the repertory and the performing style at ABT.

 

I won't try to summarize all of Macaulay's remarks but one thing that caught my eye was his commentary about the Antony Tudor repertory. ABT is supposed to be the custodian of the Tudor rep. But, as Macaulay notes, that rep has been reduced to Jardin aux Lilas, Pillar of Fire and The Leaves Are Fading in a once every three years performance rotation. You never see Dark Elegies or Gala Performance at ABT any more. Kevin McKenzie used to talk about reviving Tudor's one-act The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (which George Balanchine said was the best version of Romeo and Juliet he had ever seen) as part of a Shakespeare triple bill including Frederick Ashton's The Dream and Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane. Nothing has ever come of that project. (McKenzie's commissioned a lot of big budget bombs instead.)

Edited May 15, 2022 by miliosr

[miliosr]

On 10/05/2022 at 07:07, Jeannette said:

My secret wish is that she somehow find a way to bring the late Clark Tippett’s masterwork - Bruch Violin Concerto - back to the ABT repertoire….as there was some sort of squabble about that particular ballet between the Tippett heirs & the current ABT leadership.

Leafing through my copy of the 1987-88 ABT season program, I see that ABT debuted Mark Morris' Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes in addition to premiering Tippet's Bruch Violin Concerto. The company also launched new productions of Antony Tudor's Gala Performance and Leonide Massine's Gaite Parisienne (w/ the Christian Lacroix costumes) and staged a company premiere of George Balanchine's Ballet Imperial. So, there was a lot going on that season in terms of world-company premieres/new productions!

[alison]

They brought quite a few of those over to London a few years later, too, I think?  Those were the days ...