Category: dance

“I’m interested in how we can amplify space and proximity for artists who want to explore an idea bigger than just their next project. For example, there’s the Dancing Laboratory, which will initially center around BODYTRAFFIC, an LA-based company that commissions two or three pieces a year. The commissioning model generally suffers, because the artist must write the grant without knowing what the work will be yet, they raise the funds, and then put all the energy and resources into a few weeks, and expect the commissioned choreographer to make an amazing work. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; there’s no room for failure or trying new ideas. We decided we want to disrupt that system, as well as offer additional opportunities that would cultivate female choreographic talent.”

Young British choreographer Ruth Brill: “It’s made me more want to strive and achieve, and if I can help redress that balance by doing what I want to do, then brilliant.”

Christopher Morgan’s second job as new artistic director of the beloved Dance Place: “zeroing in on how to make his studios available to local choreographers. He’d like to develop ‘space grants.'”

The managing director of the Dutch National Ballet: “I was surprised by what he had been able to achieve with the patchiness of the training he had. … It’s a bit late for him to be a classical [ballet dancer] but that doesn’t mean he can’t be an artist, a dancer.”

“On a large plaza in the city last week, company staff diligently set up more than one thousand of the 18-inch robots to attempt the dancing record. You’ll be pleased to know that the team achieved the feat, with a total of 1,069 Dobi robots strutting their stuff in sync with one another, and as a consequence delighting the Guinness World Record officials who had traveled to Guangzhou to verify the effort.”

“She has friends. She goes out. She has a sense of humor. What she’s not? ‘Totally depressed and anorexic,’ said the filmmaker Valérie Müller, who, with her husband, the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, directed the film Polina.”

“The partnership will team the Russian composer Ilya Demutsky, who has been commissioned to compose a new score, with the Russian choreographer Yuri Possokhov. A former Bolshoi dancer, Possokhov currently is choreographer in residence at the San Francisco Ballet.”

“DMP recognises body movement as an implicit and expressive instrument of communication and expression. DMP is a relational process in which client and therapist engage in an empathic creative process using body movement and dance to assist integration of emotional, cognitive, physical, social and spiritual aspects of self.”

Kent says that the adjustment from being a dancer in New York to being an artistic director in D.C. is a challenge, but that it’s good for her two young children to see their parents taking on new work. “My service to the art form is now creating opportunities for other people. … My focus is on them.”