Got home last night and have just walked in the door with my baby. She's so excited to be home!
Dear Miss Pennywise: Thank you and your family for coming to see us perform in Maryland. Your little ones are completely enchanting and I'm so thankful for your support. xoxo - Us
" ...the happiness in the tune convinces me that I'm not afraid."
Because it isn't just every day that a BWW member gets not just one, but TWO favorable mentions in the same article from the NYTimes...
Those of you out in LA or can make it there while the Joffrey is performing this week, run, don't just walk to see them!
A generation or two of New York dancegoers grew up with the Joffrey Ballet at City Center, the company?s home until it decamped for Chicago in 1995. The vivid, distinctive presences of Joffrey dancers of the 1960s and ?70s worked indelible magic, as did the pertness for which the company was known and occasionally dismissed, despite the technical skills of many of those bouncy charmers. New York briefly saw the Joffrey in 2004 in the Lincoln Center Festival?s celebration of Frederick Ashton and his ballets, and its perfect, madcap production of Ashton?s ?Wedding Bouquet? is still being talked about.
Richard Termine for The New York Times The Joffrey dancers Kathleen Thielhelm, left, Fabrice Calmels and Valerie Robin in Balanchine?s ?Apollo.? On Friday night metropolitan-area audiences had a chance to see more of the Joffrey Ballet, in three typically wide-ranging repertory works, at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on Long Island. The company has clearly grown and flourished as the big kid on the block in Chicago, without the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater elbowing it at either side.
The dancers have grown with the times without losing the Joffrey?s trademark freshness. This achievement is probably, in part, that of their balletmasters, Charthel Arthur and *GLEBBY*, two unforgettable early- and middle-period Joffrey dancers. Gerald Arpino, who founded the troupe with Robert Joffrey, took over as director after Joffrey?s death in 1988, and his associate directors are former company dancers Cameron Basden and Adam Sklute. The Joffrey Ballet has remained a family affair. Friday?s three ballets ? George Balanchine ?s ?Apollo,? Twyla Tharp?s ?Deuce Coupe? and Kurt Jooss?s ?Green Table? ? were all well danced. But what stood out, along with the historical context of ?Deuce Coupe? and ?The Green Table,? were dancers whose performances were as quietly individual as their presences and ways of moving. Fabrice Calmels as the young god in ?Apollo,? staged for the company by *GLEBBY*, had something of the innocence and intensely dramatic approach of Jacques d?Amboise, a notable City Ballet interpreter in the late 1950s.
Mr. Calmels grew onstage from a big, disoriented just-born god to a connoisseur of goddesses and a divinity with a sense of mission. The chief muse he unhesitatingly chose was a Terpsichore danced with fierce, fine-scaled clarity by Kathleen Thielhelm, in a lead cast completed by April Daly (Calliope) and Valerie Robin (Polyhymnia).
?Apollo,? often performed in New York , is coals in Newcastle, but ?Deuce Coupe? is an important part of the Joffrey?s heritage and mission. Commissioned by Joffrey in 1973 and set to songs by the Beach Boys , this was the first mainstream crossover ballet. (The tangy but controversial graffiti backdrop is missing from this touring production.)
Thanks Cookie! Talk about great timing! I love Jennifer Dunning, but not as much as I love you.
LA is gorgeous and the apprentices had a good stage rehearsal today. We have two shows per morning for the next three days on the Dorothy Chandler stage! How does an apprentice go upward from there? Well we go to Omaha and Kansas City from here and then back to LA next week when the apprentices perform in Massine's LES PRESAGES with the main company.
" ...the happiness in the tune convinces me that I'm not afraid."
The Arpino Apprentices performed for over eighteen thousand Los Angeles children in three days. After each of the six shows the children went to the plaza of the Music Center to try some of the steps they had seen in the Dorothy Chandler.
" ...the happiness in the tune convinces me that I'm not afraid."
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