Category: dance

Chase Johnsey, a 14-year-member of the drag ballet troupe (and winner of best male dancer honors at last year’s UK National Dance Awards), quit the company
in January, saying publicly that he had been harassed for looking and acting too feminine. Now Tamara Rojo’s company has hired him at the rank of First Artist.

Even now, d’Amboise still comes to the Harlem building each day — that is, when he’s not traveling the country, visiting one of the 13 affiliate dance institutes (there’s also an exchange program in China) and working on fundraising. “Yes, he’s here every single day,” confirms Ellen Weinstein, NDI’s longtime artistic director, who met d’Amboise some 30 years ago as a student at SUNY Purchase, where d’Amboise was teaching “for a minute” (academics did not suit him). “And four to five times a day I get a call, ‘Ellen how about this?’ It’s always something exciting, always fabulous!” she laughs, mimicking her mentor’s enthusiasm.

Abilene Christian University spent many years quashing college students who wanted to dance on campus; the first on-campus dance was held a mere six years ago. But now a donor has stepped up to pay for a full-time dance instructor – and the head of the department says dance classes fit well within the university: “It’s missional because we’re helping students grow their God-given gifts.”

Robbins, who directed and choreographed On the Town, The King and I, West Side Story, and many more classic musicals, returned to ballet fully in 1969 – and changed American ballet as well. “He weeded out artifice and mannerism where he could. The naturalness he elicited was a particularly American style that then enriched the world of dance.”

“Gina Gibney runs two enormous dance spaces in New York City: Together they contain 23 studios, five performance spaces, a gallery, a conference room, a media lab and more. Gibney is now probably the largest dance center in the country. … The new branding calls for it to simply be called Gibney (as opposed to Gibney Dance), to reflect its range of public programs, affordable work space and commitment to social justice issues. … Gibney also houses the Gibney Dance Company, which was founded in 1991.”

“I never thought of music as just the basic energetic impulse that makes you want to dance; it was always like a textbook, something worth studying. If you consider choreography to be an organization of movement in space and time, then it is very instructive to look at scores and understand how composers organize their material. Both are embodiments of the same idea—music does it in a more abstract way and choreography is more concrete.”

“On a Friday night in central London, 176 shelled gastropods ‘dance’ around me … to a stretched-out, 47-minute long looping rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, played at 35 BPM – the tempo of a snail’s heartbeat. The whole thing may sound like a Trent Reznor studio experiment (Nine Inch Snails, if you will), but this is in fact Slow Pixel, an interactive art installation that urges its audience to take life at a snail’s pace.”

“When Kevin ‘Iega’ Jeff saw Fana Tshabalala’s Indumba at the annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience in South Africa, he immediately knew he would ask Tshabalala to set the work on his company. … [Tshabalala] welcomed the chance to create an American-focused version for DRDT because he believes that ‘the impact of apartheid is the same as what America is experiencing internally … America is going through a social and political transformation, and Indumba could help in cleansing.”

“In George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, nobody dies, nobody falls to the ground, nobody falls in love. The only set is the sky-blue backdrop. The women’s costumes, minimal, are white tunics. Yet much does happen. A group of women becomes a vision of pulsating classicism and of gleaming American energy.”

Abi Stafford: “A new director might also spread out roles more evenly. In addition to having happier dancers, I think this would help everyone would perform better. Those who previously carried heavy workloads wouldn’t be dancing injured and exhausted. Dancers who were underutilized would feel more confident and in shape. I’d love to see casting against type, too. Give us a chance. We may surprise you!”