Category: dance

“People with disabilities lived with the stigma that they can’t do this, they can’t do that, they can’t dance, they can’t walk, they can’t talk. When you dance with a partner, you really forget who you’re dancing with. You forget their age, you forget their ability, disability, ethnicity, height, weight, you know, forget all of that. You start to see people and feel people as people, not a person in a wheelchair.”

A dance scene as determined as Dallas’ deserves a festival that makes its aspirations visible at one big gathering at least once a year. It’s time.

“In the world of classical ballet, the presentation of flowers to the lead ballerinas is a carefully choreographed ritual, one steeped in tradition and rules, and perfected by decades of practice. It’s also a study in contrasts, as ushers with no stage experience must walk across the stage to meet the most graceful of performers at center stage. What could go wrong?” You’d be surprised. Peggy McGlone talks with ushers at the Kennedy Center who do it.

Lucinda Childs, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Maguy Marin talk about their approaches to Beethoven’s strangest music.

“Executive director Jim Nelson said the company will stage four performances of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling Sept. 22-24 (including two evening shows and two matinees) at the Hobby Center for the Arts’ Sarofim Hall. It also will stage two evening performances of its postponed ‘Poetry in Motion’ mixed repertory program there Oct. 26 and 27.”

Tara Pandeya writes about how she came to study the rigorous, highly developed styles of the Tajik and Uyghur traditions, and how she traveled to Tajikistan to study and ended up a member of the national dance ensemble and winning a televised national competition.

Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, granddaughter of the late King Sihanouk and half-sister of the current king, toured the world in the 1950s and ’60s as one of the leading dancers of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. In the 1990s, after the years of the Khmer Rouge and the later Vietnamese invasion, she located surviving dancers and musicians and refounded the company, and she’s now training a new generation.

“Two years after headlines screamed ‘Ballet in crisis’ – and the company was a hair’s-breadth from shutting its doors for good – the troupe has received coaching from arts turnaround expert Michael Kaiser, hired an executive director and rebuilt its board of directors. And after four years of travails that began when a mold infestation cost the ballet its longtime home, officials say it’s finally time to start moving forward.”

One line of experimentation has involved electronic shadows on the stage floor, an effect that can be hard to see from the seats of many conventional theaters. That’s not a problem at the Guggenheim, where the audience is above the dancers. Here’s how it works: An infrared camera scans the dancers’ outlines, 60 frames per second, even as they move, and transmits that information to a computer, which then projects images around the dancers. As Mr. Simkin explained during a recent rehearsal, the speed of the computer processing is crucial. “If there is a lag, the brain sees it as a technological trick,” he said. “If there is no lag, as we can do it now, it is like magic, giving another layer to the movement — like a big dress, my father says.”