Category: dance

Katie Dorn: “The Lucinda Childs Dance Company just gave its final performance of her 1979 masterpiece, DANCE, at The Performing Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. … DANCE is the first piece of Lucinda’s choreography I learned and it was the first piece that her newly-formed company performed. … For close to ten years, I was fortunate to dance this evening-length work all over the world. I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to say good-bye.”

“It’s understandable to experience feelings of shock, fear and even abandonment if your director leaves. It’s not just that you’ll have a new boss — a shift at the top can have a domino effect on casting, programming, rehearsal structure and branding. Here’s how to forge a relationship with your new director and take advantage of the opportunities that come from having fresh eyes on your dancing.”

“The troupe grew out of the gay liberation movement in America in the 1970s; gender-bending satirical treatments of theatre, opera and dance aimed to increase the visibility of gay performers and to celebrate the extravagant traditions of those artforms. The Trocks, as they are now affectionately known, are the only company from that time still thriving.” Why? Respect for the form and very skilled dancing (plus the fact that ballet is fun to make fun of).

Zoé Emilie Henrot was terminated by the St. Paul Ballet board last month, after five years on the job, for reasons she says she still doesn’t fully understand. Within a couple of days, financial backers approached her about forming a new company – now called Ballet Co.Laboratory – and every one of the old company’s dancers joined. (Meanwhile, St. Paul Ballet is searching for a new artistic director and has formed a partnership with the gym next door.)

Harrell was exposed, sort of, to hoochie coochie during his rural Georgia childhood, when his father would take him to traveling fairs but leave the boy with friends while he went out at night. “As I got older, I started to realize that they were going to see naked ladies dance. They were going to see a hoochie coochie show, and that was my first understanding of dance as a spectacle. Because I never actually saw it and we never talked about it, it’s always something that’s been lurking in my consciousness.”

With the company due to open its autumn programme on 18 September, one of its principal dancers has publicly declared that the NYCB needs “a moral and fair individual to lead us out of this darkness”. Signs also seemed to be emerging that the NYCB may face a boycott over Ms Waterbury’s claims that her ex-boyfriend Chase Finlay, while a principal dancer at the company, shared nude photos of her and joked about abusing ballerinas

Here’s the thing, haters: “Far more than a frothy break in the action, de Mille’s original choreography revolutionized musical theater. She had stage and film in her blood: Her father was a playwright, and Cecil B. de Mille was her uncle. That made her a natural to create dances for Oklahoma!, but de Mille did more than build on the western theme: Her ballet for the dream sequence advanced the narrative in ways singing and talking couldn’t.”

Sarah Kaufman doesn’t just mean lofty ballet companies like New York City Ballet and ABT or lofty venues like the Kennedy Center: “In Dorrance’s pieces you might find a high-tech electronic floor that enhances the music of her dancers’ feet. Or maybe there’ll be a live funk-blues band, or flamenco dancers. Dorrance has knocked about, vaudeville-style, with Bill Irwin, the stellar clown. She’s made a site-specific work on the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum.”

Annmaria Mazzini, Eran Bugge, Michael Trusnovec, and new Taylor company artistic director Michael Novak tell writer Ann Votaw how, as Novak puts it, “Human movement never lies,” and why what Taylor wanted to watch dancers do in auditions was walk.