Category: dance

Just a week into his term as artistic director of the Hong Kong Ballet, Webre says he’s impressed with the dancers’ technical standards and classical rep, and wants to inject “a higher level of sophistication into the [new] work made for the company.” He wants to create dances reflecting the city’s culture, and says he’s being inspired by Hong Kong films and Cantonese opera.

“The choreographer has long believed in ‘colliding different sorts of intelligence in one place’. Increasingly, academic research suggests that creative imagination is impossible without collaboration: such findings are being embraced by organisations such as Second Home, which offers cross-disciplinary co-working opportunities in London and Lisbon (and claims its businesses grow ten times faster as a result) or Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, whose international residency programme provides free space to creators across the arts, science and technology.”

Recent studies “reveal that dancers use multiple areas of their brains simultaneously while dancing: one part controls movement without expressive intention, another part imagines movement qualities and these parts work to execute movement while also making higher-level decisions.”

But presenters need to consider accessibility. “Disability is the mother of invention. We have been cattle truck lifted onto an outdoor stage. In Siberia, we had to charge my wheelchair batteries by driving them around in a Fiat and swapping them out daily. Feral dogs chased us on the tarmac in Moscow because we could not be driven to the plane like others. In Germany, we changed in a broom closet with a skeleton”

Salon Los Angeles has seen Frida Kahlo dance with Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro with dance hall regulars and revolutionaries, and a lot more. And so, “Miguel Nieto, whose grandfather opened Salon Los Angeles 80 years ago this week, refuses to quit, even as his gray-haired regulars dwindle, even as developers dream about turning the nightclub into condominiums like the concrete apartment tower going up across the street.”

Theresa Ruth Howard: “How can you truly comment on what you are seeing when you have no technical knowledge of a specific genre like African or hip hop? Critics who stand on the outside of a culture cannot write about what they do not know. … The black body on stage is never neutral, and the effects of its inherent politicization as it relates to the subconscious cultural ignorance and biases held by critics is seldom addressed.”

“The voguing balls of Harlem, the hoochie koochie dances of rural America, the elaborate, prancing gait of runway models – these aren’t influences that routinely feature in contemporary dance. Yet for the American choreographer Trajal Harrell they’ve proved extraordinarily fertile. … His pieces might feature a man posing semi-naked in a pair of Hermès scarves, a woman encased in a small black cube meticulously removing her swimsuit, or a man in a gaudy oriental skirt, gravely shaking his booty.”

While Instagram has become a go-to forum for dancers recording themselves in class and rehearsal, Marlee Grace has managed to stand out, though it’s hard to pinpoint why. Maybe it’s her musical selections, which range from Justin Bieber to wind and waves; her playful, impulsive choices as a mover and iPhone videographer; or the sense that she’s not working toward anything in particular, just dancing for herself and anyone who happens to cross her virtual path.

“You know Philadanco and Pennsylvania Ballet. But other than those staples, you may not think of Philadelphia as a huge dance hub. We’re here to prove that Philly is filled with underrated dance talent – and these six companies are just the start.”

“The same drive to succeed that make so many ballet students great may also predispose them to depression. And yet, as a dance writer, when I call up so many of the great training institutions in this country to ask for an interview with the psychologist they refer their dancers to, they can’t produce one.”