Category: dance

A Q&A with Jean-Pierre Frohlich, one of two ballet masters from New York City Ballet who traveled to Moscow to teach the Bolshoi dancers Robbins’s The Cage.

Ahmad Joudeh grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, where his father beat him and ultimately threw him out of the house for continuing to dance ballet. He supported his mother by giving dance lessons, but fled when the Syrian army tried to draft him into the civil war. Renate van der Zee recounts how Joudeh made the semifinals of Beirut’s version of So You Think You Can Dance and ended up with the Dutch National Ballet.

Says Dance/USA executive director Amy Fitterer, “I’m feeling every encouraged in the past two years because the conversation has gone from trying to convince people that there is a problem, (to) now we’re finding the directors are really on board.” (includes video)

The audiences have to be the “archive” of the dance project. “Audience-watching, art-watching and dance-watching form equal parts of the intimate experience. The dancers morph into living, breathing sculpture — at once molding, and being molded, by an environment devoted to the collection and display of objects.”

Possibly. It’s called the “Protein Jive Sutra” and, as you may be able to tell from the name, was created and filmed in 1971, at Stanford. Watch the entire 13-minute film for a lot – a *lot* – more info about the way RNA works (or for the bright leotards and balloons of the 200 volunteers).

“We equipped the socks with pressure sensors and vibration motors to monitor and guide the feet movement of the pair dancers. These are controlled by a master application running on an Android phone. The steps are indicated by vibration signals at specific positions of the foot, at the heel for a forward step, etc. When a user makes a mistake or gets out of sync, negative feedback is provided. It is possible to dance in the socks for several minutes without making a mistake.”

“Despite an order threatening ‘disciplinary action’ for any ballet employees who speak to the media, four company dancers blasted the board via email over their opting not to renew the contracts of co-directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda beyond the 2017-18 season … The dancers also accused the board of mismanaging the company, questioning its ability to decide what’s best for the ballet.”

“Cousins remembers one of his teachers saying: ‘If you can incorporate some emotion into what you do, there’ll be no stopping you.’ But at that point he wasn’t sure how.” As he tells Judith Mackrell, he had a revelation while being mentored by Matthew Bourne: “I was making a solo and Matt suggested that I played with the focus of the dancer’s eyes …”

Principal dancer Shannon Glover takes a photographer backstage at Johannesburg Ballet.

“She’s one of nine women around the globe, from Toronto to Paris and Memphis to Miami, who head dance companies with annual budgets of $2.5 million or more.”