Category: dance

This is the history of how the Catholic Church in Ireland influenced the law in the 1930s – and made it possible for any parish priest to stop any dance he didn’t like, for any reason, with the full cooperation of the Irish government and police. One priest “was wary, in particular, of outsiders – ‘devils’, as he saw them. ‘Persons who came to these dances from outside towns in motor cars were scoundrels of the lowest type, and were devils incarnate,’ he said.”

Aimee Meredith Cox, an associate professor at Yale, might say so. “While working in Brooklyn, Detroit, and Newark, Cox noticed communities, particularly communities of women, gathering together to create a common place for making art, utilizing such forms of expression, in some ways, as a form of protest.”

“We wanted … to figure out how to use the whole space of the stage to create an image of an injured mind. After that initial impulse, we tried to take a personal story of loss and trauma and make it universal, to zoom outwards and ask some big questions about what suffering is, what it means and how one survives something like that. … In German, the title means to be stopped or struck by something that leaves you in a kind of shock or speechlessness, an inability to respond or express anything in words. So that word became emblematic for us.”

To accompany this photo journal, the dancer-choreographer writes about Xenos, about an Indian colonial soldier fighting for Britain in World War I. “In my work, I need a character I can relate to – but also a character who can relate to me. So we decided that this colonial soldier was a dancer who is thrown into the trenches somewhere in Europe. Most of the piece takes place in a trench, at least in an abstract sense.”

“Everything was against Marie-Agnes Gillot becoming a ballerina – never mind a great one. She was too tall, broad-shouldered and most of all, she had a double scoliosis, which sometimes gives her a hump when her back is swollen. … The last great French ballerina of her generation, she hid her problem from her teachers after leaving home at nine to go to ballet’s elite school in the French capital.”

“[The video is of] Copeland performing [the] Swan Queen last week in Singapore, where she wasn’t able to finish her 32 fouettés (she was criticized for doing the same thing when she debuted the role in 2015). … Why would ballet’s biggest star want to promote a video of herself messing up, and a tweet saying that she doesn’t deserve to be in American Ballet Theatre? Because she’s bravely proving some important points.”

The city of Hamburg extended has extended the choreographer’s contract for four more years, to 2023. He is already the world’s longest-serving ballet company head, and at the end of this contract extension he’ll have been with Hamburg Ballet for a half-century. (in German; Google Translate version here)

“Facing an uncertain future with the departure of its longtime artistic director” – W. Earle Smith, who’s been at the helm since 1999, leading the company’s transition from community-based to professional and adding a ballet school – “Madison Ballet plans to cut its company of dancers by more than half and drastically trim its season for 2018-19. But its leaders insist the company – part of the city’s artistic landscape for decades – will keep dancing.”