Word: directors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kirov dancers? There is little question that Americans are technically superior -- faster, stronger, more rigorously trained. Some credit must go to Russian immigrants. Balanchine revolutionized ballet by demanding that a performer move swiftly through positions rather than prepare for them and then hold the pose. Baryshnikov, as artistic director of the American Ballet Theater, adapted Balanchine's methods to the old story ballets...
Differences between the two approaches show up starkly in the Kirov's foray into Balanchine: Scotch Symphony, set to Mendelssohn, and Theme and Variations, with its vibrant Tchaikovsky score. City Ballet's Suzanne Farrell and Francia Russell, a former soloist who is now co-artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, went to Leningrad to teach the works to the Kirov. Russell, who prepared Theme, had the harder assignment because the choreography is difficult for even Balanchine dancers. Both women learned that the no-nonsense rules they live by do not apply at the Kirov. By American standards, classes were...
...producer, director and writer of the homecoming-queen coronation ceremony in his senior year at Morehouse College, Spike Lee had a vision. He imagined a sophisticated beauty pageant, reminiscent of the old Hollywood musicals he loved. Rather than the usual lineup of leggy girls scantily clad in slinky dresses, he pictured beribboned beauties in floor-length ball gowns. Lee failed to anticipate the outrage of campus males when they learned they would be deprived of the show of flesh that was traditionally part of homecoming. A group ganged up on the young producer, threatening to beat...
These days his subject matter is grittier, but Spike Lee is still fighting to make movies on his own terms. Paramount Pictures, Lee claims, asked him to tone down the ending of Do the Right Thing, his incendiary new film about race relations, so the 32-year-old director took his picture to Universal rather than subdue the race riot in his final scene. Fiercely independent, Lee writes, directs and produces his films to prevent others from "meddling." He doesn't have an agent, publicist or manager, but the trade-offs of independence are worth it. "What...
...passion for filmmaking, not racial anger, however, that drives the director. "Spike has an appreciation, a love and an inherent understanding of cinema," notes Barry Brown, who worked on editing Lee's films for the past four years. Lee's cinematic preferences run the gamut, from Hector Babenco's Pixote and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets to musicals such as The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, a taste inherited from his mother. Lee, who has been called a "black Woody Allen," says he admires Scorsese's work. But suggest that he has been cinematically influenced by others...