New online presence for Tudor trust

The Antony Tudor Ballet Trust launches www.antonytudor.org to reinforce the relevance and enduring importance of Antony Tudor's ballets, and, ensure his works are never lost.

The new website features a comprehensive online catalogue of Tudor's ballets, complete with premiere dates, details of music, production, and cast; supplemented notes on the work, revisions and stagings; rich and historical content on the life of Antony Tudor; and, upcoming performances and related ballet news.

Nearly every major and minor ballet company in the world and many
distinguished university dance programs have licensed Tudor ballets since his death. This website will best serve to further motivate artistic directors, and future artistic directors, to continue to perform and add Tudor ballets to their repertoire. A comprehensive catalogue of ballets, archival images, and video will reinforce the power of this master choreographer and his influence on so many choreographers of the twentieth century including: Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Pina Bausch, Sir Frederick Ashton, Agnes DeMille, Glen Tetley, and Eliot Feld, to name just a few.

"Only a handful of truly great ballets survive their creators," said Sally Brayley Bliss, Trustee. "Tudor's Lilac Garden, Dark Elegies, Judgment of Paris, Gala Performance, Dim Lustre, Leaves are Fading, Echoing of Trumpets, and Undertow, as well as his smaller works including Little Improvisations, Continuo, Cereus and Sunflowers, represent irreplaceable choreography threatened with extinction in society's current fixation on full-length ballets."

As noted by The Washington Post, April 4th, 2008, following The Antony Tudor Centennial Celebration at Lincoln Center, "His (Tudor's) works are largely written off as too delicately nuanced to teach to today's technique-oriented dancers, too demanding for an audience groomed on the ready thrills and speed of George Balanchine, too financially risky for boards of directors who prefer easy sells -- Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and so on." And yet, performing in even one Tudor ballet, said the celebrated former dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, in a recent interview, amounted to "a passport to become mature, to be an adult dancer, a dancer in depth..."

The Antony Tudor Ballet Trust is a not for profit organization created under the Last Will and Testament of Antony Tudor. Mr. Tudor appointed Sally Brayley Bliss as the Co-Executrix of his Estate, and sole Trustee of his ballets, to preserve the artistic integrity and standard of excellence Mr. Tudor insisted upon.