Category: dance

Prior to working at NEFA, Sara Nash managed the USArtists International grant program at Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She also worked as senior producer at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts) for more than six years, where she oversaw the international program, the Suitcase Fund, and developed residency programs for commissioned artists.  Nash’s international experience includes working at Tanec Praha, a contemporary dance festival in Prague, and at the British Council in London.

Mackrell: “Dance has been so very generous to me as a writer, and The Guardian such a fantastic platform, that I feel I’m walking away from my own dream job. But I’ve been doing it for 32 years (nine of them at The Independent before I joined The Guardian) and if it’s time for me to focus on other projects it’s also time to hand the mic to another voice.”

Robert Lepage has returned to filmmaker Norman McLaren for his latest project Frame by Frame, teaming up with the National Ballet of Canada and the National Film Board to create a multimedia dance production that marries ballet and abstract film animation in hopes of pushing the boundaries of ballet for our technological era. The ballet took four years to make and cost $1.4 million.

“In Morocco, where state funding and institutions for the arts is scarce, break dancing has empowered young people to make their own entertainment since its arrival in the 1980s. … While protesters and outspoken artists were targets, dancers flew under the radar because they were seen as apolitical. When a second generation of Moroccan B-boy crews emerged in the early 2000s, their art really began to flourish.” (photo journal)

Marius Petipa created the commedia dell’arte-themed ballet in 1900, and it remained in repertory in St. Petersburg for almost 30 years; when later versions were choreographed by Lopukhov, Gusev, and Balanchine, the actual movement was a combination of steps passed down orally and newly created in Petipa’s idiom. For American Ballet Theater, Alexei Ratmansky went back to the Stepanov notation of the Petipa original made when it was new – and what he discovered was a surprise.

While the company had its challenges this year – most notably, having to find an alternative venue for its Sydney season, with the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre under renovation – its staging of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, sold 75,840 tickets over 41 performances in Sydney and Melbourne.

“The statistics are certainly compelling. The five highest earning workers in the Ailey organization make more than all 34 dancers and stage managers combined. [Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater] is the fourth largest American dance company based on budget, but the dancers make 30-35% less than their colleagues in other companies. AAADT performs 175-200 times per year, more than any other major dance company in the United States.”

“Writer Olivia Campbell considers the years she spent as a dancer, when it seemed that her talent was living in the ‘wrong’ body, in this utterly honest and intimate meditation. She visits regret, self-loathing, and how the name of your art can become your trigger word.”

The announcement about AD Willy Shives, a former dancer at the Joffrey and community engagement coordinator there, comes in the wake of accusations from former company members of verbal and mental abuse.

Well, techy things definitely occurred. But were they also cool – or, more to the point, useful for the dance company? “Some projects were more successful than others, but all were well worth watching: Dancers moved silkily inside 3D environments that were then projected onto screens for mixed-reality experiences. Graham’s ‘Lamentation,’ from 1930, was reimagined using archival imagery of the solo projected onto a moving dancer. And a Graham dance was captured in 3D, transforming Anne Souder, in a motion-capture suit, into an avatar.”