Category: dance

The Royal Ballet is rich in tradition, but the company’s 97 dancers are now supported by a 17-strong team of sports science and healthcare experts. “Our facilities are now similar to those of a Premier League football club,” explains Gregory Retter, clinical director of ballet healthcare. “Strength, jumping, force attenuation, cardiovascular fitness, psychological wellbeing and nutrition; all support the dancer to be free to create artistic excellence. This is a completely new concept in dance.”

The notion that dancing is dangerous and subversive is actually deep-rooted and wide-ranging. Throughout history, international dances have inflamed passions and come under Puritanical fire.

Adolphe Binder, previously the director of the GöteborgsOperan Danskompani, was the fourth director to run the Tanztheater Wuppertal since Bausch’s death, and the first to have had no direct relationship with the choreographer or her works. (The longtime Wuppertal member Dominique Mercy ran the company with Bausch’s assistant and rehearsal director Robert Sturm until 2013, when they were succeeded by Lutz Förster, another veteran company member.)

Mental health is an issue that can be difficult to approach and discuss. Dance can break down this barrier as it allows us to express ourselves without using words: how we move our bodies can say so much. Dance allows us to explore complex ideas, feelings and emotions, and find creative ways to express that in movement.

For five years, Henry Alford signed up for everything from pas de deux classes and a swing dance conference to tap lessons with Alvin Ailey and a “contact improv jam.” He researched the lives of the greats — Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Arthur Murray, Mikhail Baryshnikov — and includes anecdotes about each. For example, in the early 1960s, Martha Graham told a roomful of Texas college students that “all great dancing stems from the lonely place.” “Where is the lonely place?” asked a girl in the audience. “Between your thighs,” Martha told her. “Next question?”

The inclusive method of movement and contact was developed by English dancer Adam Benjamin. It aims to create a safe and open space for people to have personal, physical and artistic breakthroughs, regardless of whether its practitioners have any physical disabilities.

Dance Magazine talks to Sergio Trujillo, Gabrielle Lamb, Joe Goode, Rosie Herrera, and Claudia Schreier, who says, “Often I am already thinking about the things they mentioned. Translating dance into words is the gift of the critic, so to hold that reflection back at you can be incredibly helpful.”

Rodent damage to a high-voltage electric line caused a power failure at the Adelaide Festival Centre in South Australia Wednesday, forcing evacuation of the audience by flashlight. The disrupted performances were The Australian Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty and Australian Dance Theatre’s production of Garry Stewart’s The Beginning of Nature (where the audience at first thought the blackout was part of the production).

“STEM From Dance [is] a New York City-based nonprofit founded by Yamilee Toussaint — an MIT grad who’s been dancing since age 5. The program targets middle and high school girls of color, who are vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, and might not otherwise see STEM as an option or be encouraged to try it.”

“In the 1800s, tap appeared along the East River at Catherine Market, where slaves from Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island would congregate. ‘They were coming in to sell herbs and roots on their days off — they were allowed by their masters to do that — and they also had their dancing skills to sell. … They’d put down pieces of wood they called shingles and do a jig and a breakdown for money.'”