PEOPLE AND COMPANIES IN THE NEWS.

At press time it was announced that the Bolshoi Ballet will perform its original 1940 Lavrovsky production of Romeo and Juliet as well as Don Quixote at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. next summer. The company will travel to Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Costa Mesa, California. Information will follow in upcoming issues.... Lawrence Rhodes has announced that he will retire from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens at the end of the current season. Rhodes has been artistic director since 1989. ... San Francisco Ballet's Vanessa Zahorian won the female prize in the Fifth International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize in Toronto, and the National Ballet of Canada's Jhe Russell and San Francisco Ballet's Guennadi Nedviguine shared the male prize. ... Gordon Peirce Schmidt has been appointed artistic director of the Grand Rapids Ballet.... Allen D. Gartrell is the new artistic director of City Ballet Theatre in Milwaukee.... Christine Dakin's Mouth of the Stones, choreographed for the Ballet National de Mexico, will have its premiere at the Centro de las Artes in Mexico City on May 19.... The Women's Theatre Festival and the YWCA of Philadelphia honored New Jersey Ballet marked its fortieth year with a spring season at Kean University.... Lexington Ballet Company celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with performances at the Historic Lexington Opera House in February.... The MorganScott Ballet presented a program entitled Remembering Matthew Shepard: A Vigil in Dance at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, March 30.... Australia 2000 is looking for self-funded companies to perform along the route of the Olympic torch relay from June 8 to September 15, 2000. For information, contact Eric Rock at [phone].

* A collaboration between choreographer Bill T. Jones and soprano Jessye Norman that has been more than a year in the making will be performed May 24 and 27 at Manhattan's City Center. The two explore the poetry of Frank O'Hara with dance, music, and text in How!Do!We!Do! Both Jones and Norman will explore each other's art form: Norman will dance, Jones will sing, and both will speak.

* Three years ago Doug Varone created Democracy for the students of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, but the choreographer thought the piece "didn't feel finished." Kay Cummings, chair of NYU's dance department, agreed. "I did something I had never done before," Cummings explains. "I said, `do you want to come back and do a second section?'" But after the second section was completed, Cummings and Varone "looked at each other and said: `one more section.'" The complete trilogy will be on view this month at Tisch, a feat that necessitated tracking down graduates of the school who first performed the piece in 1997. The cast includes alumni from the classes of 1997 and 1998, in addition to the current students.