YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: PERFORMING-ARTS: DANCE

DANCE: Europe. Copenhagen, designated as the cultural capital of Europe for 1996, presented a number of well-known ballet companies in its spring festival, and the city was also in the news with the announcement that Maina Gielgud would become artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet in March 1997. Not only was she the deposed director of the Australian Ballet, but she also was a woman breaking into the male hierarchy of one of Europe's oldest and most distinguished companies. The English-born Gielgud, with two decades behind her as a leading European dancer, had directed the Australian company for 14 years until the board decided that it was time for change and chose not to renew her contract. Others regarded this as a harsh reward for her work in stabilizing the company, developing a repertoire of classical and modern ballets, and encouraging Australian creativity. Because of the Royal Danish Ballet's historic importance, Gielgud's new job would present rigorous challenges. These would range from maintaining the classics, especially the 19th-century August Bournonville works that were crucial to the company's standing, to discovering choreographers who would shape ballet's future. Two choreographers whose works created an impact during the year turned postmodern eyes toward ballet classics and tradition. Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, choreographed in 1995 for his British company Adventures in Motion Pictures (with men supplanting women as the swans and in the transformation becoming wilder creatures) made further history in 1996 with a four-month season in London's West End. The transfer made the production accessible to a wider public, and such was this Swan Lake's success that it was filmed by BBC television. For the Hamburg (Ger.) Ballet, choreographer Mats Ek turned to another Tchaikovsky masterpiece, The Sleeping Beauty, and gave the fairy tale an anarchic updating, setting it in the rock and roll era and including scenes of heroin addiction. The Swedish Ek was internationally acclaimed for his reinterpretation of 19th-century classics, and in 1997 his new Sleeping Beauty would also be presented by the Cullberg Ballet, the Stockholm company founded by his mother, where most of his work had been created. Elsewhere in Germany there were stormy debates about closings and cuts in funding, especially in Bremen, Leipzig, and Frankfurt, with suggestions that a nationwide arts policy would help dance's plight. The most public arguments were in Berlin, where, after the heady freedom of unification, dance was said to have reached a period of stagnation and decline. In particular, there was controversy over the future of the city's three large ensembles, and the new artistic director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper Ballet, Richard Cragun, found himself quickly caught in the cross fire. The Stuttgart (Ger.) Ballet, where Cragun had once been part of a celebrated dancing partnership with Marcia Hayde, concluded an era with Hayde's departure as director following a period of bitter wrangling. Her successor was Reid Anderson, who himself had been a Stuttgart dancer before taking over at the head of the National Ballet of Canada. Birgit Keil, yet another star of Stuttgart's golden era in the 1970s, founded the Tanzstiftung Birgit Keil to foster creative development in young professional dancers. In France Charles Jude, celebrated dancer with the Paris Opra Ballet, accepted the directorship of the Ballet-Thtre de Bordeaux. In the independent sector there was no shortage of small-scale experimental work. Financial constrictions tended to dictate the number of dancers an independent choreographer could work with, which was perhaps a factor behind seasons in Vienna and London that featured solo dancers, with results pointing to radically different conceptualizations of dance. Enter Achilles, a work by Lloyd Newson and his British company DV8 that mixed dance with social realism, was transferred from the stage to the screen to win the year's Special Prize in the television music and arts category of the Prix Italia. European historians were increasingly concerned with reconstructing lost seminal works and were attracting critical debate about changing values. For the Ballet of the Zrich (Switz.) Opera, the British-based dance and art historians Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer reconstructed Skating Rink, a 1922 ballet choreographed by Jean Brlin for Les Ballets Sudois, with music by Arthur Honegger and Cubist designs by Fernand Lger. The setting was a 1920s roller-skating arena frequented by Paris's working classes, and the critical response was favourable. The Edinburgh International Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996 with a strong dance program that looked across modernism's past. The return of the Martha Graham Dance Company, in its first British season in 17 years, included reconstructions of several of Graham's early works and occasioned widespread interest. Mark Morris, Jiri Kylian, and Pina Bausch displayed their companies in early works, and both Morris and Bausch presented full-length operas to illustrate the power of movement to expand the meaning of the word. In France the Montpellier Festival likewise turned to remembrance as a theme and included revivals of early Postmodernist pieces that had originated at New York City's Judson Church and of works by the choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who died in 1992. Other festivals focused on social critiques. The Internationales Sommertheater Festival in Hamburg, for example, examined alienation by looking at cross-cultural dance. There was change at two landmark theatres in 1996. In France the dancers of the Paris Opra Ballet returned to the Garnier Opera House after an 18-month closing, during which time the Ministry of Culture had funded a major program of restoration and modernization. In Britain the Sadler's Wells Theatre, home in the formative period of what became the Royal Ballet and later an international showcase for dance, was demolished in preparation for a two-year rebuilding program, financed in large part by the national lottery. The Wells's management team moved to another London theatre, the Royalty (renamed the Peacock), to ensure continuity of presentation. Another person who broke through the bastion of traditionalism was Deborah Bull, a principal dancer with Britain's Royal Ballet. She opposed the Oxford Union's motion that "this house believes the arts in this country are elitist" and helped win the debate for her team, an achievement that attracted major press coverage. Bull also played a part in launching a new book published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in London. Called Fit to Dance? The Report of the National Inquiry into Dancers' Health and Injury and edited by Peter Brinson and Fiona Dick, it was the fruit of years of research and revealed that, contrary to popular opinion, dancers needed to take urgent steps to improve their fitness and prevent injury. Deaths during the year included Antonio Ruiz Soler, the most celebrated Spanish dancer of his day, and Tamara Toumanova, renowned in the 1930s as a "baby ballerina" with Les Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo and creator of many roles, including Balanchine's Cotillon. (See OBITUARIES.) Nicholas Beriozoff, the Lithuanian-born dancer, choreographer, and ballet master; Joy Newton, a founding dancer with the Vic-Wells Ballet, director at the Turkish Ballet School, and teacher at the Royal Ballet School; and Paula Hinton, British ballerina, also died during the year. (ANN NUGENT) MOTION PICTURES (For International Film Awards in 1996, see Table.) The celebration of the centenary of the cinema, which had begun in 1995, continued throughout 1996. A number of major cities presented exhibitions, either to commemorate the past century or to predict the next one. One film made in 1995 to mark the occasion, Lumire et Cie (Lumire and Company), was shown during the year. In the work 39 contemporary filmmakers--including such diverse directors as Spike Lee, the producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory (see BIOGRAPHIES), and Zhang Yimou--agreed to make a short film under the conditions in which the Lumire cameramen had worked--using a restored Cinmatographe camera and with film prepared according to the original Lumire formula. Each director was limited to one 15-m (50-ft) length (about 50 seconds) made without artificial lighting or editing. Those who saw the result found it fascinating.