Category: dance

The way to document the finished works hasn’t been completed yet, but each will be accompanied by extensive musical notes, Labanotation — a method for recording dances — interviews with dancers and video from multiple angles. Designs for each dance will be created, though not built. And five to seven years after a work is first choreographed it will be restaged in the studio and additional notes added.

I’ve run a handful of races per year since my first 5K in 2008, and have done enough theme/costume runs to be used to seeing women (and occasionally men) in fluffy statement skirts—sometimes stiff ballet-inspired tutus, sometimes just sparkly costume skirts (utilitarian running skirts are a different sartorial category.) I stopped thinking of running tutus as a novelty, however, when I saw them being sold as official merchandise at the 2013 Color Run in Chicago.

“The piece spurring the conversation [at Pacific Northwest Ballet] is RAkU, created in 2011 by Ukranian-born Yuri Possokhov, who danced with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow before becoming the San Francisco Ballet’s resident choreographer. The subject matter is the true story of the Buddhist Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Japan, which was burned down in 1950 by a mentally disturbed monk.”

“As conversations about bullying heat up throughout the country, with the role of social media and the effects on adolescent mental health emerging as related concerns, there’s no better time to consider what the dance world can do to help male students of all ages feel safe and accepted.” Ryan P. Casey does some considering.

Acosta, who had a painful separation from his country and family in order to become a star in Europe and the U.S., says “I want to bring them to the world, but also to bring the world to them.”

“Both the creators of the ballet and its performers have been nominated for the Benois de la Danse, nicknamed the ballet’s Oscars, in four professional categories: Ilya Demutskiy for Best Composer, Yuri Possokhov for Best Choreographer, Kirill Serebrennikov for Best Stage Design, and dancer Vladislav Lantratov for Best Performance in the title role of the ballet Nureyev.” Serebrennikov, whose recent film Summer will be in competition at Cannes next month under house arrest in a case many observers consider trumped-up, just had his detention extended into July.

“‘Justin,’ yelled the ballet master Patrice Hemsworth. ‘Move your arms. Good, good, good. Boys, you look beautiful. Go girls. Use your shoulders.’ She watched silently for another few beats and then, as the recorded music stopped, yelled out: ‘The feet were good but, the arms have to work with it. And you’re rushing like crazy.'” A reporter visits Ballet Tech, a city academy for middle- and high-schoolers founded by choreographer Eliot Feld.

Olga Smirnova, one of the Bolshoi’s biggest stars, and Jacopo Tissi, a La Scala Ballet alumnus who joined the Moscow company in 2016, were refused nonimmigrant worker visas to dance at a Youth America Grand Prix gala at Lincoln Center this week.

“In the West, our idea of monastic ritual involves prayer and quiet reflection. But there are monasteries in Assam, in the far reaches of northeastern India, where prayer has always been, and continues to be, expressed through dance. The monks in these communities, or sattras, perform with and for each other, and for the deity. Sattriya, as this dance form is known, became one of the eight official classical dance forms of India only in 2000 – since then, its visibility has grown beyond the monastery walls.”

“‘I would rather try and fail than not try,’ he says. He’s applied that same philosophy to his career: Last fall, he decided to leave life as a ballet star behind to find out what possibilities might lie in musical theater, TV and film. In the course of our conversation, he repeats the same sentence over and over, like a mantra: ‘You never know how far you’re gonna go if you don’t jump.’ This is his jump.”