Category: dance

“Under the USSR regime, Moscow put particular effort into developing dance in the area, through the non-negotiable funding of a national dance school. In time, Kyrgyzstan became the best dance training center in Central Asia, forming many dancers who went on to have international careers.” Things changed after the Soviet collapse …

Film and documents “are among the highlights from the Joffrey’s archive, which has been donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The gift coincided with the company’s return to New York for the first time last week since it moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s.”

“Janet Collins, Raven Wilkinson, Debra Austin, Nora Kimball, Misty Copeland, Francesca Hayward. All of these successful black ballet dancers have something in common: they skew toward the fairer end of the sepia spectrum. Onstage, the duskiness of their complexions can be all but washed out, bleached by the lights. From the audience, they could present as a white girl back from a beachside vacation, or be perceived as Latina. This observation is in no way meant to challenge these women’s ‘blackness,’ or their talent. It’s to highlight a long-overlooked fact.”

575 linear feet of material has been donated to the dance division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, on the grounds of Lincoln Center.

“When you do physical theatre. you learn when to give your weight, and when to let go. These are skills that are fundamental in a human being’s life, but we tend to ignore them.” His pupils, he said, learned how to “reach out” to others. They learned how to communicate. They learned how to listen. They learned how to work as a team. Oh, and their academic performance soared.

Shawn Theagene joined the Bloods at age 12, dealt drugs by age 14, and got a knife in the back of the skull at 15. Twenty years on, he says the ‘bruk up’ style of street dance saved him, and he’s spreading it to others.

The University of Tokyo designed a high-speed projector that projects 1,000 frames per second — which they say is the world’s fastest. By using the projector alongside a 3D-mapping system and precise sensor tracking, the video creators were able to change the look of the dancers and the aesthetics of the video in real time.

Bunch, speaking of Eugene Ballet Artistic Director Toni Pimble: “There were times when I’d play what I had for her, and she’d say, ‘That’s great, but I’m going to need probably twice that length, because of the time it’s going to take people to get off the stage.'”

Lerman, who teaches at Arizona State University, “has paved the way for a whole generation of dance makers to discover the power of social change through community engagement and by, as she puts it, ‘rattling around in other people’s universes.'”

The high-speed projector works at 1,000 frames per minute, and “over the course of about one minute, the dancers are made to look like skulls with empty eye sockets, big-toothed clowns, and terrifying dolls with their jaws unhinged.”