Category: dance

Power is currently the artistic director and CEO of the Prix de Lausanne dance competition and is the former administrator and AD of the Houston Ballet Academy. She said, “I like to build things, I like to develop things, whether it’s programs or strategic planning, and implementing and organizing strategically the path ahead.”

One choreographer: “We don’t have time to play around anymore.”

“There are times when I do just want to make a dancey dance. … But for me, I always get to a certain point when I feel it’s a waste of time and energy. Being black and gay there’s so much that I’ve faced in my life that I can’t be oblivious to what’s happening in the world. I can’t put all that aside and say: ‘Let’s just choreograph this pretty picture.'”

Siphesihle November, aged 19 and a new member of the NBC corps de ballet, talks to Q about his personal and artistic journeys to the far side of the globe. (audio)

“It turns out he was adrift in a sea of Carlton Draughts … During more than a year of self-imposed exile in Melbourne, he spent hours on park benches, washing away the pain of a wrecked career with six-packs of beer.” Sarah Kaufman looks at Hallberg’s new memoir.

The company is breaking ground for its first permanent studio, a former furniture store and auto repair shop in South Philadelphia that will be called the Center for World Premiere Choreography. BalletX director Christine Cox is serious about that name: in addition to space for morning dance class and rehearsal, the Center (which is expected to open over this winter) will provide space for choreographers to work, and Cox promises 40 new ballets over the next ten years.

A new study, published in the open-access journal <a href=”https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00305/full“>Frontiers in Human Neuroscience</a>, shows that older people who routinely do physical exercise can reverse the signs of aging in the brain, and dancing as a form of exercise is the most effective.

Six months ago, critic Siobhan Burke raised the issue in The New York Times. Now, in Britain’s The Observer, Luke Jennings writes, “In the last few seasons the Royal Ballet stage has seen record numbers of female characters brutalised and killed. … Consider this body-count alongside the number of recent abstract works in which women are split, splayed and otherwise manhandled, and certain embedded attitudes reveal themselves. None of these works, in which female characters are defined by their passivity and victimhood, was created by a woman.”

Robert Fairchild, the recently departed New York City Ballet principal dancer who starred in An American in Paris and will now co-star in a City Center Encores! production of Brigadoon, says, “The two disciplines, ballet and singing, they’re really at odds with one another, because they come from such different parts in your body. It’s exciting, but it’s definitely a challenge to both sing and dance at the top of your game.”

Britain’s MacMillan “also effectively reinvented the 19th-century narrative ballet for an audience ready for tales of passion, drama and violence rather than those involving myths, swans and chivalry. He was — like Jerome Robbins and Antony Tudor in the United States — a bringer of neurosis, psychological drama and real-life grit to the rarefied world of ballet.”