Category: dance

Dancing, moving your body around, and trying to be sexy are all fairly vulnerable acts. Because if you do a bad job, people think you look stupid, you get rejected, and you wind up embarrassed. This fear of embarrassment often makes people stiff and uncomfortable on the dance floor.

“Indra Jatra, an eight-day festival celebrated mostly by the Newar community, the native residents of Kathmandu, is also known as the festival of deities and demons. It especially honors Indra, the Hindu god of rain, to mark the end of the monsoon. The masks and dances can be fearsome, entertaining and awe-inspiring, depending on the performers’ movements.”

Two years after she took the helm, “it appears that Kent’s fame has not attracted enough ticket buyers and donors to fund the new vision of the Washington Ballet, with more and better dancers performing the ‘Great Books’ of ballet. It’s a big risk, because the transformation will be costly and take years. And then there are the questions no one seems to have asked in the planning stages: Does the public want this kind of company, and will enough donors fund it?”

Alastair Macaulay: “How many admirable policies can any company honor at one time? Currently it looks as if Ballet Theater has discarded Fokine, Ashton, Tudor, and — a big departure — the international stars from its scheduling. And who can notice Ballet Theater’s admirable purity of classical style? Its too-many-cooks approach to ballet obscures that.”

Svetlana Zakharova has devoted her life to ballet since she was a child, and as an adult, she’s been one of the Russian president’s favorite dancers. She’s also been a member of the culture ministry in Russia, and she’s one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite dancers. When asked about Putin, she says, “The most important thing for me is that everyone, not only the Russian president, but all the world leaders talk to each other and avoid war. … But I’m not the person to answer this question. I live in my own closed world.”

A pair of essays, by Gia Kourlas on how New York City Ballet’s dancers are standing up for decency and respect rather than defending the behavior of their now-departed colleagues, and by Siobhan Burke, wondering why the union that’s supposed to represent all the dancers is fighting for the two who were fired rather than the colleagues they demeaned in their texts.

“Dance to Health started with a hunch: that the arts have the potential to deliver health improvement more effectively and more cost-effectively than the NHS. We needed a major health challenge that the arts might solve. We lighted upon older people falling over.”

Companies are finally getting there, but, as Theresa Ruth Howard reports, it’s taken a while for darker-skinned dancers to get the right to wear tights that actually match their skin tone.

Rocío Molina conceived (ahem) the work, titled Grito Pelao, with singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz as a celebration of pregnancy and motherhood. “I will stop performing [the piece] in October because I will no longer be able to dance,” says Molina, “as I’ll be almost eight months pregnant. I’ve always liked the idea of the piece dying when I give birth to a new life, so I think that is ultimately what will happen. I can’t talk about being pregnant if I no longer have the baby inside of me.”

Brazil’s economic crisis ravaged Rio’s Teatro Municipal, home to the city’s ballet and opera; many of the dancers were reduced to accepting food donations. This past June, the ballet performed for the first time in a year, and here’s a report from backstage.