Category: dance

Ben Duke’s dance-theatre piece Stroke Odysseys, now touring Britain, puts five stroke survivors onstage, alongside dancers and musicians, to tell their stories — including how performing Duke’s specially-tailored choreography has improved their conditions.

“New York City Ballet, which forced out three male stars this year after a nude-photo-sharing scandal, is replenishing its ranks: The company announced Saturday that it was promoting seven dancers, including Joseph Gordon, who was named a principal dancer.”

Last year, Crossover Into Business program director and HBS professor Anita Elberse was developing a case study on ABT, and reached out to the company executive director Kara Medoff Barnett, an alumna of HBS. “Anita mentioned the Crossover Program as an experience that has been transformative for professional athletes,” says Barnett. “We looked at each other and had the same idea: How about inviting the ABT dancers to sit next to the NBA players?”

Choreography, like a lot of artistic endeavors, can make for lonely, frightening times … and so you need someone to talk to about it. “Most people would glaze over on the second sentence. … You’re developing an idea while you’re talking just because someone is receiving it who understands what you’re doing.”

The competition – where dancers from three different areas in Mali are asked to perform dances from other areas or traditions – was imagined as a way to bring some unity to a country wracked by tensions among the groups. “Over six weeks, TV audiences shared the fate of eight young men and women from different regions, who shared a house Big Brother-style in Bamako, the capital. Each week they performed before an audience and the TV cameras, their numbers progressively falling as a competitor was eliminated by a vote by the public and the jury.”

“It’s hard to deny that traditional ballet causes more pain to women than to men. And the fallout from ballet’s year of #MeToo will force us to examine whether it still has inherent value as an art form, despite the pain it can cause and its structural and gendered imbalances. The fact that we’re exposing ballet’s structural injustices seems like a promising start.”

“The new work in rehearsal, Dream within a Dream (deferred)< .em>, which will open [American] Ballet Theater’s fall season Oct. 17, is a hybrid of tap and ballet. And that’s a combination that almost never works.” Brian Seibert explains why that is, and he watches how Dorrance and the ABT dancers are facing the challenges.

“I realized during the first ballet I did, the first original work I did [for the Louisville Ballet] was in the fall of 2016, that it was pretty much about my unsuccessfulness in relationships.” Robert Curran was in a seven-year relationship with Hallberg. He reflected on the relationship with the benefit of time, distance and a renewed self-awareness. “When I opened my eyes to what was going on, we might have been together for seven years, but we weren’t together for seven years,” said Curran.

“He illustrates this idea by knotting his hands and pulling up his fingers very rapidly in turn; it took him 15 years to master this movement, he says with a grin, but you couldn’t watch it for 15 minutes without falling asleep. ‘Why? Because no more information is coming out. It doesn’t matter how much effort I’ve made. But if I go like this’ – he sticks out one finger mid-twiddle and holds it aloft – ‘you snap to attention. Your brain goes ‘Oh … anomaly or trend?’ That is the beginning of narrative.'”