Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco Ballet’

Miami City Ballet been selected to make its debut at the 2010 Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center on September 28 and 29, when it will perform Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section.

The Golden Section (1983), a ballet for 13 dancers with music by David Byrne, had its Miami City Ballet premiere in the 2009-10 season.

The festival, from running September 28 to October 9, will showcase 20 dance companies and choreographers from across the United States and around the world, including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. Miami City Ballet is one of 10 dance companies making their debut in the festival.

All tickets are $10 and go on sale at 11 a.m. September 12 at www.NYCityCenter.org or by calling CityTix at 212.581.1212.

For more information about Miami City Ballet, visit www.miamicityballet.org.

Patrick Armand will join the staff of the San Francisco Ballet School in September as the trainee program principal. He will teach the trainees in daily classes, stage and rehearse repertory, and oversee trainee performances. He will also teach in the school at various levels.

Born in Marseille, France, Armand won the Prix de Lausanne in 1980. He joined Ballet Theatre Français in 1981 and was promoted to principal dancer in 1983. In 1984 he was invited to join the London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet), and in 1990 he joined Boston Ballet.

Armand served as a jury member of the Prix de Lausanne in 1998 and 2009 and returned as a teacher and coach for the 2010 competition. In 2006 he was appointed teacher and ballet master of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

San Francisco Ballet has announced the addition of 12 new dancers for the 2011 season.

Artem Yachmennikov will join the company as a principal dancer and Vito Mazzeo will join as a soloist. Yachmennikov trained at the Vaganova Academy and joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 2008 as a first soloist. In 2009, he won the Silver Medal at the Korea International Competition. Mazzeo received his early training at La Scala Ballet School. From 2005 to 2008 he performed with The Royal Ballet, and in 2008 he joined Teatro dell’Opera.

Joining the corps de ballet are Daniel Baker, Nicole Ciapponi, Koto Ishihara, Elena Kazakova, Dustin Shane, Sebastian Vinet, and Lonnie Weeks. In addition, Kimberly Braylock, Myles Thatcher, and Sylvie Volosov have been promoted from apprentices to the corps de ballet.

Those joining San Francisco Ballet as apprentices include Caroline Wilson and former San Francisco Ballet School students Evan Hewer, Patricia Keleher, and Raymond Tilton. The company roster now stands at 69 dancers plus five apprentices.

San Francisco Ballet will offer a free performance at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, August 8, as part of the 73rd concert season in the city’s Stern Grove Festival.

The company will perform Helgi Tomasson’s Prism; the pas de deux from After the Rain by Christopher Wheeldon; the pas de deux from Act 3 of Don Quixote, with choreography after Marius Petipa; and Mark Morris’ Sandpaper Ballet.

Sigmund Stern Grove is at 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard in the city’s Sunset/Parkside district. Attendees should arrive well in advance to secure lawn seating; picnicking is encouraged. The festival provides no parking, which is always a challenge, but there’s a free bicycle valet service and a free shuttle within the grove for elderly and disabled visitors.

To learn more, visit www.sterngrove.org or call 415.252.6252.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is offering a 25 percent discount until May 14 on tickets to its 2010 Dance United fund-raiser. The June 3 event in Portland will feature dancers from OBT, The Joffrey Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, the Australian Ballet, and Dutch National Ballet.

The program will include San Francisco Ballet dancers in a pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s Quaternary, Dutch National Ballet performing Hans Van Manen’s Two, and a preview of the Rose Adagio from Christopher Stowell’s The Sleeping Beauty, which will premiere this fall at OBT.

To claim the discount, use the code “UNITED25” when ordering online at www.ticketmaster.com/event/0F00447114AD437F or by phone at 503.2.BALLET.

If you did an online Google search on May 7, you didn’t see the search engine’s familiar logo on its home page. Instead, there was an oval sketch of a scene from Swan Lake that—if you squinted and had a vivid imagination—looked somewhat like the missing logo.

The one-day-only sketch was a tribute to the ballet’s composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in celebration of the 170th anniversary of his birth. Google worked with San Francisco Ballet to stage a photo shoot around the company’s Swan Lake production, and those shots were then rendered into a doodle by Google’s Jennifer Hom.

For a behind-the-scenes look of the photo session, shot by San Francisco Ballet photographer Erik Tomasson, visit www.sfballet.org/interact/watch.

Kristin Long and Gennadi Nedvigin in Helgi Tomasson's Giselle, returning to San Francisco Ballet in January 2011.

Two world premieres of works by Christopher Wheeldon and Yuri Possokhov and the company premiere of George Balanchine’s Coppélia are among the highlights of San Francisco Ballet’s 2011 season.

Following the opening-night gala on January 26, the season will offer eight programs performed in alternating repertory, from January 29 to May 7.

The so far untitled piece by Possokhov, the company’s choreographer in residence, will be his 13th for San Francisco Ballet. It premieres February 3 on a program with Sir Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations and Balanchine’s Symphony in C.

Wheeldon’s new piece, his seventh for the company, opens April 8, sharing a program with Michel Fokine’s Petrouchka (100 years after its premiere with the Ballets Russes in Paris) and Renato Zanella’s Underskin.
The new Coppélia is a co-production with Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, Washington, where it premieres in June 2010. It will make its San Francisco debut on March 19, 2011.

“I am particularly delighted that the company will offer the San Francisco Ballet premiere of George Balanchine’s Coppélia; a work that is very special to me since I performed the role of Franz in the original version of Balanchine’s production,” said the company’s artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet. His production of Giselle will return on January 29.

San Francisco Ballet also will welcome back John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid, on April 30, 2011. The company presented the piece’s U.S. premiere in its 2010 season.

Subscription packages of varying length to the 2011 season range in price from $49 to $3,800. To order them, call 415.865.2000 or visit www.sfballet.org, where single tickets

John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid, a full-length story ballet, makes its U.S. premiere March 20 at San Francisco Ballet.

Neumeier’s ballet, to a commissioned score by Lera Auerbach, tells the story—familiar from the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Disney animated movie based on it—of a mermaid heroine who comes to know both marine and human life.

The choreographer created The Little Mermaid for The Royal Danish Ballet to mark the 200th anniversary of Andersen’s birth. San Francisco Ballet will present the current performing version, commissioned by The Hamburg Ballet, where Neumeier is artistic director.

The program—which is not recommended for younger children–will be presented through March 28. For tickets and more information, visit www.sfballet.org.

The Performing Arts Library at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design continues to amass a video archive of the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (known as “The Izzies”), presented annually for a quarter-century to San Francisco Bay Area dance artists and organizations.

 The Izzie Video Archive includes recordings from the annual award celebration—the most recent

Izzie Award winner Scott Wells is included in a video archive in San Francisco.

was held January 12—as well as recordings and other material submitted by nominees and award winners.

 Visitors can watch such award-winning performances as What Men Want by Scott Wells, The Ballad of Polly Ann by Jo Kreiter, and FLUX: Work in Progress Events by Dohee Lee. Wells won the 2010 choreography Izzie; Kreiter and Lee won special awards for their works.

 MPD also is celebrating Erik Tomasson’s fifth year of photographing San Francisco Ballet with an exhibition of his work through March 6 in Gallery 2 of the museum.

 The Performing Arts Library, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, is open from noon to 5 P.M. Wednesday through Friday; call 415.255.4811, extension 818, for an appointment to view the collection. For more information, visit the museum’s website at www.mpdsf.org.

We have been publishing DSL (formerly known as Goldrush) for more than 5-years. This particular story has always been one of my favorites. Enjoy–Rhee

By Evelyn Cisneros
 
Sometimes it’s not dancing that makes a difference

You never know when something you do will touch the life of another person in a significant way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of dancing, it’s that the things you’d least expect to make a difference are the ones that seem to matter the most. I’ll never forget how a split-second decision I made provided comfort to a young girl.

I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than a hot bath and bed, but something kept me from brushing this girl off.

I was in Detroit for a seasonal guest performance of Nutcracker during a hiatus from San Francisco Ballet, where I danced for 23 years. I was frequently mobbed backstage by little girls requesting a pair of my used pointe shoes—autographed, of course. Knowing this, I tried to be prepared with as many pairs as I could pack into my theater case. But that final night in Detroit, sitting in my dressing room packing up to leave, I came up one pair short. A young girl shyly approached me, asking for a pair for her sister who had put “a pair of pointe shoes worn by the Sugar Plum Fairy” on her Christmas list. I told her I had none left, and her face fell, and she stood there looking so disappointed that I felt my heart twinge.

I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than a hot bath and bed, but something kept me from brushing this girl off. All I had left were my warm-up shoes—de-shanked and shabby—but on impulse I dug into my ballet bag, pulled them out, and offered them to her. The huge smile that instantly transformed her face brought a smile to mine as well, and I asked for her sister’s name so I could sign the shoes. I don’t remember the name, but I scribbled a note to her and signed it “With love from the Sugar Plum Fairy, Evelyn Cisneros.” The girl hugged and thanked me, and I watched as she nearly danced out of the theater.

I never thought about that girl again, but two years later I was back in Detroit. Once again, after the well-wishers and autograph seekers had left the theater, the same young girl came up to me. She asked if she could speak to me. “Of course,” I told her.

“Do you remember me from when you were here two years ago?” she asked. “You gave me a pair of autographed pointe shoes for my sister, and you gave me the only pair you had left.”

The girl instantly came to mind, and I said that yes, I remembered her.

She continued, “I thought you might like to know how grateful I was that you gave my sister those shoes. She had talked about wanting to ask you for a pair days before the performance. You made her so happy.” The girl paused, and tears came into her eyes. “That night, after I gave her your shoes, she was killed in a car accident. It means so much to me that you made her happy that night. I think about that all the time—how the last night of her life was so special—and I wanted to thank you.”

I had just lost my own cousin, who was my older brother in life, and I held that beautiful little girl in my arms as we shared our tears. She looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s OK—I cried a lot the first year too.”

I don’t remember how—or if—I answered her. But I’ve never forgotten how it wasn’t my dancing that night so many years ago that made a difference in someone’s life—it was that reach into my dance bag for an old, worn-out pair of pointe shoes. That moment was my confirmation that taking time for a child can be life changing, and is really all we have to give.