Internationally famed modern dance star Judith Jamison took over as artistic director of Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Wednesday, succeeding its founder and namesake who died Dec. 1. Calling her "one of the great talents of the American theater," board chairman Harold Levine announced the appointment at the company's new dance center and school near Lincoln Center.
Jamison danced with the Ailey company from 1965-80, and her close association with Ailey and dedication to his ideals made her the natural choice.In accepting the directorship, Jamison recalled that Ailey told her only recently, "You're going in a new direction now," and said he was talking not only about her own Jamison Project company but about "broadening horizons in general."
"There will be new directions because I want to fulfill his dream and mine," she said. "I'm nervous but I have no fears. I am taking on this responsibility as a way of showing my love for Alvin by keeping his legacy alive."
Jamison said she would continue Jamison Project, sponsored by the cities of Philadelphia and Detroit, through next June, to fulfill its touring commitments. Then some members of Jamison Project will be merged into the Ailey company.
-DEVASTATION OF HURRICANE HUGO came down especially hard on the arts in Charleston, S.C., where the Office of Cultural Affairs estimated a monetary loss in excess of $10 million.
The Gaillard Auditorium, home of Charleston Ballet Theatre, the Charleston Concert Association and Charleston Symphony Orchestra, suffered disaster when the loading dock doors blew in, destroying a $60,000 Steinway piano and damaging all the electrical and mechanical equipment, the stage floor, and six rows of seats. Repairs at the theater are estimated in excess of $4 million, with eight to 12 months needed.
Charleston Symphony estimated its losses at $1,300,000, including the entire orchestra shell and several hundred thousand dollars' worth of instruments. Charleston Ballet's "Nutcracker" will go on elsewhere in town, but a premiere production of "Cinderella" has been moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where the company maintains collaborative ties with Buffalo Ballet Theatre. The Ballet lost many properties stored in a local warehouse, and its entire stock of pointe shoes.
Recently two benefits have been announced for the Spoleto USA Festival, located in Charleston for the past 13 years. On Jan. 29, actress Lynn Redgrave will emcee a concert in New York's Tully Hall, with Alice Tully herself as honorary chairman. Tickets will range from $1,000 to $100. And in Charleston on May 25, the opening of the 14th festival, Leonard Bernstein will conduct the Spoleto Festival Orchestra in the restored Gaillard Auditorium.
-WHILE THE 500TH ANNIVERSARY of the discovery of America by Columbus will be celebrated with a new opera, leftists in Spain are suggesting that there's not that much to celebrate. "It was the start of colonialism, of the genocide of Indians," said a spokesman for the Left.
Others have noted that 1492 was also the year the Inquisition expelled Jews from Spain, and the last of the Arabs who had occupied the country for centuries were forced to leave.
But Spain, holding a world's fair in Seville in 1992, wants to use the Fifth Centenary to celebrate its links with Latin America and look to the future.
The opera, "Cristobal Colon," is less gung-ho than might have been expected. After the famous cry "Land," native Indians chorus "On seas of blood." It has already been performed, with tenor Jose Carreras as Columbus and Montserrat Caballe as Queen Isabella.
"For Spain, 1492 means a lot, but then they have this dilemma of how to present it, a bit like the French with the bicentenary of their revolution," composer Leonardo Balada said. "In the opera, we certainly don't say this was a moment when Spain was glorious."
Though vitally interested in Spanish music, Balada has never left his native United States.The libretto is by Spanish playwright Manuel Gala.
-TEXACO'S METROPOLITAN OPERA broadcasts celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, making this the oldest radio programming in continuous existence. Texaco also boasts the most durable corporate sponsorship in the history of broadcasting.
The broadcast has had only two hosts since its beginning - Milton Cross, and Peter Allen who began in 1975, after Cross's death. Intermission features remain the same, Opera News on the Air and the Opera Quiz still being the most popular of all.
-SIR JOHN PRITCHARD, 68, music director of the San Francisco Opera, died of cancer in Daly City, Calif. last month. A noted Mozartian, he began conducting at Glyndebourne Festival in his native England, and his music director and/or principal conductor posts have included Glyndebourne, the BBC Symphony, Cologne Opera, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and London Philharmonic. . . Emerson Buckley, former music director of the Greater Miami Opera and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Florida, died in North Miami Beach at 73, of acute emphysena. Buckley was famous for championing American composers, and frequently traveled recently as conductor with tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
-FOUR SOVIET DANCERS are the first from their country to be allowed to dance in America without having to defect. They are: Yuri Zhukov, a member of the Kirov Ballet, who is spending the season with the San Francisco Ballet; Galina Alexandrova of the Bolshoi, also with SFB; and wife and husband Alla Khaniashvili and Vitaly Artiushkin, who will work with the Ballet of Los Angeles, as performers and teachers.
-AND IN REVERSE ACTION, Michael Shannon, 19, is working as a soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet. Shannon caught the eye of director Yuri Grigorovich at the Jackson (Mss.) Ballet Competition three years ago, and was invited to attend the Bolshoi Academy, where he graduated.
-DANCE NOTES: Besides his starring role in "The King and I," Rudolf Nureyev also recently danced on the stage of the Kirov Theater in Leningrad, in his first return since his defection in 1961 . . . JOHN NEUMEIER has inaugurated the new Ballet Center Hamburg, in a remodeled school that dates from the 1920s. The building contains five studios and four halls, offices, complete range of studios for staff, and room for 34 student boarders out of a total student body of 180 . . . PETRUS BOSMAN, formerly of the Ballet West artistic staff, is now director of dance at the Virginia School of the Arts.
La Scala Opera Ballet has been plagued by constant strikes which have kept it off the boards all year. The company did dance Roland Petit's "The Blue Angel" in September 1988, but despite numerous re-schedulings, nothing has been danced since . . . Martine Van Hamel, Terry Orr and Savion Glover received Awards for 1989 from the Dance Educators of America. . . . Lawrence Rhodes has been named artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens of Montreal, and Kenneth MacMillan has been appointed artistic associate of the Houston Ballet . . . Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolais will each maintain their own dance companies, but have combined to form Nikolais and Louis Dance.
-HONG KONG'S NEW Cultural Center opened in November, with a month-long festival featuring all the major performing arts, international artists and companies, and a royal gala honoring the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The $76 million building, centrally located on the harbor front, houses three theaters - the 2,100 concert hall, the 1,750-seat grand theater, and a 542-seat studio theater; also rehearsal rooms, galleries and exhibition areas. The center has taken criticism for its appearance, likened to "a giant bird or a super ski-jump," but its promoters hope it will win over its critics, as the Opera House in Sidney, Australia has done.
-DANCERS OF THE STATE BALLET of Rhode Island have been receiving phony letters telling them to quit for being fat, old or disruptive, and artistic director Herci Marsden blames another dance company, attempting to steal her dancers. About a dozen apprentices and members of the 30-year-old semi-professional dance company received the letters. The matter was turned over to the police for investigation.
-ARTISTS IN ALL MEDIA confront a dreary future of more competition for diminished rewards, a collection of new studies finds.
Hamstrung by a decline in real earnings nearly five times that of professions in general and with more and more people entering creative fields, artists vanish uncounted and unaccounted for into such occupations as restaurant waiter or waitress and taxicab driver.
"What I see is massive numbers of the supply side (of arts professionals) coming out of our colleges and universities and very few jobs that are paying jobs and are available," said Milton Rhodes, president of the New York-based American Council for the Arts, which is publishing the results.
The studies showed that the disparity between earnings of men and women employed in the same arts jobs is greater than in the American work force at large. For example, while 75 percent of dancers are women, they earned only 66 percent the amount male performers get. Women painters and sculptors average less than half as much.
Unemployment is rampant, witah the Screen Actors Guild reporting 85 percent of its 110,000 members out of work at any given time, and 80 percent forced to earn living expenses in other fields.
-JAMES DE BLASIS, artistic director of the Cincinnati Opera, received a Post-Corbett award for outstanding achievement as a performing artist. In 22 years with the company, his many achievements include directing more than 60 operas, not only for Cincinnati but many regional companies, and creation of ECCO! Ensemble of Cincinnati Opera for education and outreach.
-CONDUCTOR LORIN MAAZEL has extended his contract as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony to the end of the 1995-96 season. He announced his decision in the midst of the orchestra's 4-week tour of the Soviet Union and Europe.
In the interest of his Pittsburgh post, Maazel has relinquished all his scheduled concerts and about 40 recording dates with the Berlin Philharmonic, through the 1990-91 season. (He had been a leading contender in the search for a permanent conductor in Berlin, before Claudio Abbado was chosen.) He will also step down as music director of the National Orchestra of France, effective Aug. 31, 1990.
-CAN A BAD REVIEW kill a good show? A growing number of Broadway producers, writers and theater people say the answer is yes - if it's in the New York Times.
The long-simmering debate boiled over recently when British playwright David Hare's latest drama, "The Secret Rapture," closed shortly after Times drama critic Frank Rich soundly panned it as "coarse agitprop" and "so pallid an imitation of life."
Rich was not the only critic to voice unfavorable opinion. The Daily News called the play "too calculated, too schematic"; New York Newsday called it flawed but fascinating.
Hare fired off a letter to Rich, calling him irresponsible and "gratuitously abusive." The feud landed on the front page of Variety, with excerpts from both letters printed in such diverse publications as The Wall Stree Journal and the Village Voice.
The 40-year-old Rich, who joined the Times in 1980, has clout that is unrivaled among critics in any other major art form. When reviews are mixed, said press agent Merle Debuskey, "You'll find the show either succeeds or fails on what the Times critic has said."
Yet a bad Rich notice is not always fatal. Lewis Allen, producer of "A Few Good Men," said the box office is struggling but alive for his show, a drama about military justice. Rich has had little affection for Andrew Lloyd Webber, but the British composer's "Phantom of the Opera" is still the hottest ticket on Broadway and "Cats" has been running since 1982.
Clive Barnes, Times theater critic for 10 years before going to the New York Post in 1977, said he had his own run-ins with producers when he was in Rich's shoes. Barnes believes many producers are just looking for a scapegoat if their plays bomb: "You have to remember that most of these shows that get terrible notices are terrible shows."