Somehow it's fitting that on a day that the Dow plunged 315 points to close its worst week of 2014, ABT was at the exchange to ring the closing bell and celebrate its Nutcracker. Perhaps it was just a coincidence. Perhaps not.
But there will be celebration today when we watch Sarah Lane and Joe Gorak in performance at BAM and tomorrow when the glorious Stella Abrera debuts as Clara opposite Alex Hammoudi. What we really need, though, is some champagne-glass-smashing good news in the way of promotions for these two women who have long deserved it.
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OMG, the Mariinsky has added yet another performance to its BAM visit. Another Cinderella has been added for January 20th. Maybe we will really get to see Pavlenko in the leading role. Wouldn't that be terrific? Pavlenko …
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NYCB is eating up a lot of Haglund's credit line this Nutcracker season. The December 27th performance will feature Lauren King opposite Jared Angle, and the December 28th matinee includes debuts of Ashly Isaacs and Taylor Stanley as Sugarplum and her Cavalier. We wouldn't miss either for the world.
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Kiev: The Kiev State Ballet School has refused to accept money raised by Moscow`s Bolshoi Theatre after it emerged the star dancer at a charity gala had supported the annexation of Crimea.
At the Bolshoi last Sunday, some of the world`s leading dancers from Russia, Ukraine and France put on a dazzling performance to raise money for renovations at the Kiev ballet school.
The show was organised by prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova, who was born in Ukraine and trained at the school, which she said was in dire need of repair.
. . .
"The Ukrainian artists who participated in the concert appear to not be aware that the Russian dancer S. Zakharova signed a letter supporting the politics of (Russian President) Vladimir Putin in Crimea," wrote the school`s director Ivan Doroshenko in a letter published on the Ministry of Culture`s website on Saturday.
"Otherwise, they would never have agreed to take part in this provocative farce."
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"The money raised during this concert is not comparable to the thousands of dead, the hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory, the tens of billions of hryvnias that Ukraine has lost," said Doroshenko, referring to the bloody conflict in the east of the country where the government has been fighting Russia-backed separatists for the past eight months.
"Needless to say, the choreography school of Kiev renounces the `help` of Svetlana Zakharova," he concluded, while accepting that the school was still in need of help for rebuilding work.