Category: dance

A secretly-made recording of a discussion between chief exec James Dolan (also chairman of Madison Square Garden and CEO of Cablevision) and a group of the dancers reveals disagreement and nervousness, as well as some seeming confusion about whether or not this event is mandatory for all dancers.

A statement from the Madison Square Garden Company called the article, on Marie Claire magazine’s website, “beneath the ethical standards of Hearst” and described the anonymous source of the recording of that meeting “deceitful and cowardly.”

“Chaos, yes, but also 18 compelling two-minute performances using both familiar and emerging new media tools, like full-body motion tracking, livestreamed 360-degree video, projection mapping, …” Kelsey Lannin reports from DanceHackDay in San Francisco.

He’s been at Britain’s flagship ballet company for 22 years now. “I think I’ve always struggled, and I’ve always found everything quite hard, so [turning 40]is no different. Sometimes you do look around the studio and think, ‘God, I’m twice your age’, but I feel good. I feel better than I did at 30, that’s for sure.”

In the performing arts world, it is the custom that artists continually create and promote something new, something original. Choreographer Trajell Harris has conceived of a series of pieces that explore and expand on an idea. Could this lead to a new way of thinking about presenting dance?

“The ideal, of course, is a piece in which the artistic qualities – in dance, those would be shape, tempo, rhythm, attack, etc. – are such as to elicit a feeling that you recognize as being on the side of justice. But you never know whether that’s really justice or just your wish for a piece you admire to share your politics.” Joan Acocella writes that choreographer Kyle Abraham manages to transcend the dilemma.

“By mixing moving bodies with mechanically repeating geometries, Oskar Schlemmer pointed us at today’s world of work, where automation is everywhere in the transcendent projects of globalizing neo-liberalism. Yet the smooth, cute, and joyous mood of Schlemmer’s robotic sensibility conveys something that at least temporarily alleviates the feeling that we are living in an epoch of click-bait robotics fueled by predatory virtual capital, where memes and farcical fragments of vanity culture keep repeating before our eyes, ad infinitum.”

“I heard someone say a black girl in a ballet is a distraction. If there are 25 white girls, everyone will look at the black girl. Everyone must be alike in a company, meaning everyone must be white.”

Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is directing the staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte opening at the Palais Garnier late next month, and her central idea is to have a dancer doubling each of the opera’s six characters. The singing roles are double-cast, and the plan was to use six dancers from de Keersmaeker’s own company with one cast and six members of the Paris Opera Ballet (who had been rehearsing with the choreographer for several weeks in Belgium) with the other. According to a statement from the Paris Opera, de Keersmaeker has decided that, with two sets of singers involved, for practical as well as artistic reasons she wanted to set her extremely detailed direction on only one group of dancers – her own, who have been working on the choreography for more than a year. (in French; Google Translate version here)

The purchase was funded by the sale of visual art by some of Petronio’s famous collaborators.