Category: dance

Sophie is one of the first transgender students to sit the Royal Academy of Dance exam.

In 2008, the ballet dissolved its artistic partnership with the Eugene Ballet and struck out on its own with Peter Anastos at its head. “Starting a new company from scratch is certainly not for sissies,” he says now, as he prepares to finish up his decade with the reinvented company.

“AXIS today includes six professional dancers with and without disabilities, a 100-city annual tour schedule that includes regular performances in the Bay Area, burgeoning apprentice and teacher-training programs, school visits that reach approximately 15,000 students, … and partnerships with institutions and organizations in the vanguard of inclusive instruction and physically integrated dance.”

“In the ballet world, ‘shut up and learn the steps,’ I think is an archaic sentence.” Reporter Kate MacArthur does a Q&A with the Joffrey’s artistic director.

Brian Schaefer pays a visit to the Brooklyn-based company Ballez, whose director, Katy Pyle, says, “We’re using these definitions of masculinity and femininity to create something that’s not neutral, but it’s layered and it’s complicated.”

“Even as she prepares for her company farewell gala, the Havana-born artist remains a highly critical observer of how – and what – she dances.” Allan Ulrich talks with Feijoo about the roles she did and didn’t get to dance and about her training at Alicia Alonso’s famous ballet school and what it has meant for her art.

“One of the complexities the company faces is that the definition of Hispanic or Latino has become increasingly hybrid, complicated and personal, partly because of the blending brought by immigration and globalization. And also because Latin America is enormously diverse. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Argentine, Colombian culture: They can seem to have little in common beyond a shared language.”

“Former professional ballet dancers Wendy Whelan and Virginia Johnson join us to discuss life after a career in dance. Whelan, who had a 30-year career with the New York City Ballet (NYCB), is the inaugural Lida Orzeck Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Barnard. Now artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Johnson was a founding member and principal dancer with the company for more than 20 years.” (audio)

“The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has a new fleet of subway and streetcars, so why not show them off in style? In its latest ad campaign launched late last year, called We Move You, dancers from the National Ballet of Canada run, twirl, and twist their way through empty stations and rail cars with an elegance few riders can match.” (includes video)

The company was performing its “Romance” program last Thursday (April 6) when the lights on the musicians’ stands flickered and then, in the woodwind and brass sections, went out completely. Yet the musicians played on and the dancers danced on. Peter Dobrin has the details.