Category: dance

Cunningham, with John Cage, changed everything: “The dance marked a crucial turning point for both Cunningham and Cage, as it pivoted around the notion that time, rather than melody or narrative, should constitute the underlying relationship between dance and music. … Cunningham and Cage were free to create independently of one another, with their shared aesthetic only fully revealed in the performance itself.”

Anthony Huxley is “a dancer of superlative refinement with the air of a silent-movie star, caught somehow between the world of the speaking and the world of dreams. In ballet, where dancers fight to show their best angle, Mr. Huxley is prized for his line and poetic sensibility.”

Hired to run the ballet school after the previous staff member quit over the firings of a huge number of dancers, a married couple quits. “The couple, graduates of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy, had danced in Russia and the United States before opening a dance school, the Academy of International Ballet, in Media. Their son, Aleksey Babayev, is a Pennsylvania Ballet corps de ballet dancer.”

“In the study, his team asked 39 female university students in Britain to dance alone to a drum beat. The researchers used a motion-capture system to track the women’s moves. They animated each dancer as an avatar to try to make sure that only the dance movements — and no other physical features — would affect ratings. Then they recruited 57 men and 143 women to watch 15-second clips of the avatars and rate them each on a numeric scale. Hip movements were the key predictor of how positively a dancer was rated in this study.

Yes, Martha did one comedy, a Punch-and-Judy piece from 1941. And audiences did find it funny. The Martha Graham Dance Company found some archival footage of the piece, and hired choreographer Annie-B Parson (herself a “wait, what?” choice) to devise a new piece based on it. Siobhan Burke talks with Parson about how she did it.

Historian Simon Morrison (Bolshoi Confidential) talks with Here & Now‘s Robin Young about how turmoil has abounded at the theater for all of its 241 years, and how the ballet company has stabilized following the horrific attack on former ballet artistic director Sergei Filin (and after Filin’s subsequent involuntary departure from the company). (audio)

Can dance change lives? In “The OA,” it does. “When people say, ‘I was crying when I was watching it,’ it’s like, exactly. That is exactly what dance has the power to do. Whether or not it’s true — which I think is a beautiful question in the series — I know that it can heal.”

After 20 years at the theater, including 13 as a principal, Maria Alexandrova has resigned. Bolshoi management says “This was Ms. Alexandrova’s personal decision,” and that they asked her several times to stay on. She herself posted on her Instagram page, “I’ve made a decision and I’m turning this page.”

“When Marta Becket died on Monday at 92, her only survivor was the theater, the walls and ceiling she painted depicting a colorful audience that would never leave: Renaissance royalty, nuns and monks, clowns and jousters, revelers and cherubs — and Clive Barnes, the longtime drama critic of The New York Times, a playful nod to her theatrical past.”

Chase Johnsey, of the all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (the Trocks), “faced off competition from the likes of Vadim Muntagirov and Alexander Campbell, both principal dancers at the Royal. Johnsey’s win is not only a celebration of his talent, but also a celebration of the fact that ballet, however rigorous its traditions, has an inalienable genius for the wayward, the comic and the camp.”