Category: dance

Maybe fashion videos pay more than dance? In the video (which replaced the traditional runway show), you’ll see “eight members of American Ballet Theatre, three Hiplet dancers, three members of Bullettrun Parkour and YouTube dance star Kandi Reign.”

Choreographer and dancer Alexandra Pirici created her performance piece for the New Museum for five dancers, and a hologram. “‘The biological body wants toilet breaks,’ she said, ‘it gets tired, it decays.’ A hologram, though, makes no demands.”

Evelyn Lamb explains the issues of mass, inertia, vertical velocity, and angular momentum – and she talks to an applied physiology professor who figured out how tiny changes in arm position could make the difference between triple jumps and quads.

“It doesn’t matter what Isaac Hernández’s skill set is, he will be the dancer that got to where he is because his girlfriend is also his boss. Ms. Rojo is the AD who gave prominent roles to her boyfriend and the management at [English National Ballet] are the ones who left a publicly funded dance company open to litigation from dozens of dancers claiming discrimination or constructive dismissal because the boss is sleeping with one her dancers. Should their relationship go south, which of course never happens, …”

After a well-received performance at the Kennedy Center, the performers stayed away from the annual gala after-party. “On Instagram, the dancers are directing followers to a new account called Artists of Ailey, which references their union. They have been in contract negotiations since December. … AGMA, the dancers’ union, said in a statement … that the artists boycotted the gala ‘based on management’s failure to adequately address the group’s substandard wages and benefits.'”

“Dance and devotion have a long, rich relationship in Judaism. And dance continues to be used by some groups, including the Hasidim, as a form of ecstatic spiritual expression. For the members of Ka’et, all of whom identify as dati leumi, or religious Zionists (akin to modern Orthodox in America), dance also offered a way into prayer. As Rabbi Schwartz said, ‘I can’t fully express myself spiritually without connecting to my body.’ But putting that body on a theatrical stage, in front of an audience, was a bold and unusual move.”

“‘Our main goal is really to help dancers,’ says David Makhateli, a former principal with The Royal Ballet who launched the Grand Audition with his wife, dancer Daria Makhateli. With 10 artistic directors from a wide range of countries present, a dancer who might not fit one company’s requirements has many more opportunities to be noticed. … Most [participating] companies are based in Europe, but American directors have also taken part in past editions.”

So pronounces no less an authority than Dance Magazine about the two New York Giants players about the commercial in which they recreated the famous duet from Dirty Dancing. “And yes,” writes Courtney Escoyne, “they did The Lift.”

Siobhan Burke: “I’ve often wanted to make a map tracing who mentored and influenced and studied with whom, to make some sense of the present — not to impose order on dance history, but to do justice to its sprawl. Where do generations begin and end? What little-known links connect them? How does one movement become another? Maybe the map would illuminate stories we hadn’t seen.

One of Balanchine’s most famous maxims, for better or worse, was “ballet is woman.” Yet at City Ballet, he produced a number of extraordinary male dancers, including Jacques d’Amboise and Arthur Mitchell, both 83, and Edward Villella, 81 — American treasures who overcame stereotypes about men and ballet and, on Mr. Mitchell’s part, racism, to devote themselves to the art form and to Balanchine.