Category: dance

“As an ensemble dancer in The Lion King, India Bolds, age 32, plays nine characters in every show, eight times a week. That’s a lot of entrances and exits, costume changes and choreography to remember. But after five years of dancing in the production, she has the show down pat. Dance Magazine followed her through a performance day to see what it takes to be in Broadway’s third-longest-running production.”

“As soon as the show was over on May 1st, we were hearing complaints that the administrative team did not like our dance at all,” said junior student Ibrahim Sesay. “Calling our whole performance nasty, calling us a disgrace to African culture, picking fights with one of our students and they were just attacking us and our whole performance.”

This puts a new spin on the old Emma Goldman quote, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Well, why shouldn’t the hit BBC (and Netflix) show Peaky Blinders become a ballet?

“When it was announced that the Royal’s feathery blockbuster was being entrusted to Scarlett, eyebrows were raised. It wasn’t his talent that was in question, it was his artistic unpredictability. He exploded on the scene in 2010, when, still a junior dancer, he created Asphodel Meadows, a beautiful one-act work that proclaimed his classical credentials. Yet he went on to wrong-foot audiences with dark and disturbing works such as Sweet Violets (2012), a gothic sex-and-death thriller about a Jack the Ripper serial killer, and Hansel and Gretel (2013), reimagined as a grotesque paedophile nightmare. But hey, he says, it’s only make-believe. ‘I was just trying to tell a good story. You don’t have to worry about me.'”

“[The retired ABT star’s] Sleeping Beauty Dreams, an avant-garde dance production about the internal world of the cursed princess during the one hundred years she was asleep, [is] premiering in Miami in December before going on to New York and then on … a 30-city tour in 2019.” Reporter Olivia Nuzzi does a profile of Michael Caputo, the show’s producer, who was interviewed by special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s office last week. Caputo is an erstwhile political operative in both the U.S. and Russia and was a senior communications adviser to the Trump campaign.

“Not only am I a black choreographer I’m a modern choreographer. I have a fear that if this piece is seen as a failure, they will never hire another black choreographer again. … I just want to make a beautiful work in the same way the other two choreographers on that program are going into a work, but they don’t have that same weight on them.”

Dancer Benedict Nguyen: “We make contributions to creative processes all the time. Some of these are obvious: We often improvise material or generate entire phrases to be incorporated into a work. Others are more innocuous: Dancers are sometimes asked to give feedback that ends up shaping the composition of a work. This is choreography. As working relationships between dancers and choreographers evolve, the dialogue on crediting authorship needs to reflect the collaboration at the heart of so many works.”

“On my way up to the Paris Opéra studios I was so nervous! Literally shaking. But within about eight minutes, I was reminded, ‘Oh, yeah: This is the same old thing. It’s just dancers in a studio, dancing.'”