Category: dance

25 years ago this month, the choreographer suffered a fatal heart attack backstage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of his ballet Mayerling. Crisp, who was there, remembers the fateful evening and pays tribute to MacMillan’s “fascination with the psyche rather than the fouetté … [his] interest in movement’s capacity to convey psychological complexity.”

Marina Harss talks with the choreographer and Leonid Desyatnikov, the only composer from whom Ratmansky has ever commissioned a score. Their sixth collaboration is about to open at American Ballet Theater.

Up to last year, the company was based in a cramped building with three studios and a leaky roof. In February they acquired a former fitness center, which has now been renovated into a spacious, light-filled, multi-studio headquarters. To celebrate, the family of the company’s founding donor has made a major new gift.

“Taking inspiration from the rotoscope – an early filmmaking device that allowed animators to trace over live-action – the Japanese design group EUPHRATES used an innovative computer algorithm to capture outlines and extract other information from a video of a ballerina, Kurimu Urabe of the Bolshoi, dancing in a ballet studio.”

Siobhan Burke: “I can’t remember when I first sensed disgruntlement toward the E-word. But in speaking with dancers and choreographers over the years, I’ve noticed that more often than not it elicits an eye roll, head shake, groan, sigh or shrug of ‘whatever that means.'”

“At his final curtain call, Mr. Fairchild, the youngest dancer to have a farewell event at City Ballet” – he’s 30 – “choreographed an unusual flower presentation: he stood by a basket of roses and handed a flower to fellow principal dancers, who came onstage one by one.”

“The 2018 ballet season will be cut in half, from a two-week run in 2017 to just one week. … [Saratoga Performing Arts Center CEO Elizabeth] Sobol said the board decided to reduce City Ballet’s stay because it lost more than $1 million on the NYCB residency. She said continuing to lose money on the residency is ‘not prudent’.”

Over a year and a half, older adults who took weekly dance classes showed gains in their balancing ability. There were no such improvements in the traditional exercise group. Researchers also found hints that all those mambos and cha-chas had extra brain benefits.

“We must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs, reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince.”

The director of the National Portrait Gallery: “The corporeal verve of dancers is a perfect remedy for the typically static environment of museums. ‘All these artificial boundaries between art and poetry and performance need to come down,’ Sajet says. ‘Our goal is to bring a sense of emotion about who we are as humans into the Portrait Gallery.'”