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In 2013 Hamburg’s ballet director looks back at 40 years as head of THE HAMBURG BALLET
On February 24th, John Neumeier celebrates his 70th birthday. The director of THE HAMBURG BALLET was born in Milwaukee/Wisconsin (USA) in 1942. He was educated as a dancer in his hometown, in Copenhagen and at the Royal Ballet School in London and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Theatre Studies from Marquette University / Milwaukee. In 1963 he came to Germany and joined John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet. In 1969 he became Germany’s youngest ballet director in Frankfurt.

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Photo by Chris Van der Burght

Francisco Camacho, left, in Meg Stuart's “Blessed,” amid wet ruins of his cardboard paradise. Mr. Camacho says he plays a man “losing control of things around him, but he still goes on and on.”

“You have to think about questions of fate,” Ms. Stuart said in a telephone interview from her home in Berlin. “People in spiritual decline often think, ‘Why do these things happen to me and not to someone else?’ ”

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The Ballet de Monte Carlo gave the world première of "Lac", at the Grimaldi Forum, closing the year of 2011.
Jean Christophe Maillot, artistic director of the illustrious Ballet de Monte Carlo had taken the iconic 19th century ballet 'Swan Lake' set to the famous Tchaikovsky’s score, and proposed his own rendition in 'Lac', a highly dramatic, rather sinister affair with layers of new psychological insights, challenging the original libretto.
It was a particularly festive premier, not only for the presence of the company's number one aficionado, princess Caroline, or the season decorations galore, but for the great company and the full philharmonic orchestra of Monte Carlo and its director Nicolas Brochot.

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David Hallberg in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow

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Paul McCartney’s first ballet score, “Ocean’s Kingdom,” is in no way an important addition to the corpus of ballet music, but it deserves a better staging than the one it’s been given by New York City Ballet. Never less than agreeable, it has plenty of color and melody. Curiously, it sounds as if it had been composed in the neo-Romantic era before the Beatles: some of its most expansive tunes have hints of Borodin and Samuel Barber; some of its atmospheres evoke Ravel; and its jolliest passages are on the cusp of Bernstein’s “Candide.”

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In the autumn of 2011 the Royal Academy of Arts will stage a landmark exhibition focusing on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement will trace the development of the artist’s ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years.
  
 

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The prestigious international competition for young dancers culminated in a dazzling Final. Each year the standard of the finalists improves and the jury this year faced a difficult task in selecting the seven scholarship winners.
Of the 205 candidates who took part in the selection round last autumn, 85 were chosen to take part in the competition in Lausanne and 74 came. The 20 dancers who delighted the public demonstrated clearly the reasons why they had made the selection for the final round.
The prizes awarded are either a year of training at one of the Prix's partner schools or an apprenticeship at a partner company. The Jury chose the following winners from amongst the 20 finalists:
 
- Ms Mayara Magri, Brésil
Petite Danse School of Ballet, Rio de Janeiro Fondation Leenaards

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When he died, at 57, Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872-1929) was many things: the most celebrated of Russian émigrés; the impresario of the Ballets Russes, the world’s most famous ballet company; a pivotal figure in the recent histories of opera, stage design, visual arts, classical music, as well as theatrical dance; the hub of successive schools of artistic modernism; the man who had taken ballet from state patronage into the world of commercial sponsors; the most celebrated homosexual since Oscar Wilde.

He died in bed in Venice, in the Grand Hôtel des Bains de Mer, on the Lido.