Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the box office opened for the American Ballet Theater's New York spring season, $52,000 worth of tickets were snapped up on the first day-a record for A.B.T.'s Manhattan home, the Metropolitan Opera House. The allure of Mikhail Baryshnikov's new Don Q certainly helped, and the presence of stars like Gelsey Kirkland in A.B.T.'s galaxy did no harm. But other U.S. dance companies are also enjoying a boom. Indeed by almost any measure, dance has become the fastest-growing of all the performing arts...
Audiences? Nationwide, annual attendance at all dance events (ballet, modern jazz, ethnic) now stands at about 15 million, a threefold increase in just five years. Ballet schools? There are thousands of them, from small outfits run by a single proprietor-instructor to big operations affiliated with the major professional companies. The highly-rated A.B.T. school, where the parents of an aspiring dancer may pay $700 a year for nine hours of classes a week, now has 1,000 students, an increase of 25% in five years. But that is no big deal: the schools run by the San Francisco Ballet...
...dance companies, the U.S. now has about 850 in all, compared with some 450 only five years ago. But the key to ballet's future is the growth of professional companies, which not only train new talent but also new teachers. There are now 55 such companies, v. 35 five years ago, and two of the fastest-growing new entries are in middle-sized cities...
...Cleveland Ballet. General Manager Gerald Ketelaar concedes that his city used to be "a desert for dance." But that was before 1972, when two former dancers, Ian Horvath and Dennis Nahat, decided that a town that supported a first-rate museum and symphony orchestra could handle ballet as well. They launched a school, and a company followed four years later. With an annual budget now approaching $1 million, the ballet has 28 dancers under contract and will stage 27 performances this season; attendance regularly runs to 70% to 80% of the city's 1,500-seat Hanna Theater...
...amateur dance company since 1929, it was nearly defunct in 1972. Then Chuck Fischl, an energetic New Yorker with a theatrical background, was brought in as general manager. He and Artistic Director Robert Barnett decided that the company should turn professional and expand. Fischl, now only 28, began promoting ballet throughout Georgia. Result: the company, which once had to venture as far as Alaska to find audiences, now runs two summer schools in Georgia and has established homes away from home in Savannah, Athens and Augusta...