Category: dance

Rafael Bonachela, who took the reins of the company from Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon in 2009, “wants to create a Sydney Dance Company 2, a sibling company of eight young dancers to tour regional theatres throughout Australia. … [He] also wants Sydney to have its own ‘dance house’ – a dedicated theatre just for dance performances such as Sadler’s Wells or The Place in London – and an annual international dance festival.”

During the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, Philadelphia had a thriving scene that nourished some of the later 20th century’s most important African-American dancers. Dance Magazine‘s Jennifer Stahl interviews Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet founder Theresa Ruth Howard about what made the city such a relatively good place for black dancers to work, while Judith Jamison, Delores Browne, and Joan Myers Brown offer comments on video about the city’s dance history.

A reporter travels to the northeastern corner of Vermont to visit Steve Paxton, who was a star in Merce Cunningham’s company in the 1960s and went on to invent Contact Improvisation.

Janie Taylor thought she’d finished with performing when she retired from City Ballet. But Benjamin Millepied – and a multifaceted artistic life that includes teaching and costume design, along with, yes, dancing onstage – has her back in the life. A friend says, “Now she gets to decide, ‘I’m gonna feel who I am again. I’m gonna be creative.’ And guess what? Her body feels better.”

Choreographer Ben Duke on making dance post-Brexit and in a world dramatically changed by terrorism and war: “I think art is the opposite of terrorism. And that means the more frequent and violent the terrorism is, the better the art has to become.”

“These ballet dancers are great and they’re ready and what they need is more interesting work. I feel people are playing it safe a lot. If anything, I think it’s the choreographers and the directors who need to make an effort for these dancers who have made this art form their passion, and to really be as daring or at least as relevant as some of our peers were when they were commissioning pieces a long time ago.”

“In taking dance out of the theatre, Is This a Waste Land? not only takes the theatre out of dance, but most of the dance too. We’re left with a kind of social choreography, and an open expanse of questions that can – like other projects that venture outside theatre’s contained space – revitalise our experience of performance, spectatorship, sometimes even the world itself. Like seeing a familiar landscape anew.”

“By reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet – its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld.” Ismene Brown looks at his body of work – especially the little-performed short ballets – in this 25th anniversary year of his death.

“This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies. Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines.”

“For as long as anyone can remember, theater and movie directors, rich sponsors of art, dancing masters and acting coaches here in Russia have demanded sex from young actresses, ballerinas, and students in exchange for a part in a movie, a role in a play, or promotion in the ballet.”