Category: dance

“What I love now is mentoring young people about performance. Where do you get your ideas? You must read, do your homework. And get rid of those cellphones. Lift your eyes and look at each other. You aren’t going to grow if you don’t watch people. Tell their stories. Tell your story.”

“‘I sort of thought, well that was interesting, and it was great, and I had the 30 years in SoHo,’ she said before a rehearsal in Brooklyn last month. ‘I’m sort of moving on.’ That worked for a while.”

Ankle surgery in 2014 has kept him out of commission for quite a while, so he’s giving his repaired foot a test run next month – a long way from the hubs of the world’s dance media. (He told the New York Times he wants to “just step onstage quietly here and see what transpires.”) Of course, now that a Sydney journalist has broken the news, the world’s dance media will probably flock there to watch.

“People who’ve never been to any ballet, let alone The Nutcracker, have heard of her. Yet who is she? And why does she dance?”

Dancers can cover their tats with makeup, but there are some challenges: “Covering tattoos in more exposed areas isn’t easy. Dancers not only sweat, but they have to lift, catch and clutch one another, which means damp body parts and makeup rubbing against expensive, difficult-to-clean costumes.”

“On Saturday, the Ballet Theatre will officially make Baltimore one of its three performing homes. For the first time since 1993, the city will have a fully professional resident ballet company, though that means sharing the troupe with Annapolis and Bowie. No longer will Baltimore be just a stop on a national ballet company’s tour — and in recent years, the city has barely been even that.”

Robert Battle’s family didn’t have a lot of money when he was in elementary school, so when his mom made sure he had his dance shoes before starting lessons, it was a big deal: “I would even sleep with them. Just by putting them on, I had the keys to what I was hoping to become.”

“All of the sounds of the ice—stop-stop-stop, melt-melt-melt, crack-crack-crack—can be transferred to the body. It was an amazing experience, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the night, in the cold. Everything was changing, second by second. I’ve been to Iceland, and to the Faroe Islands, but I have never been surrounded by ice before. And then the people of Paris stopped to watch us, watching the ice. It was a mirror.”

Oskar Schlemmer created his 1922 Triadic Ballet as a response to the Industrial Age. Now two curators and 30 collaborators, including Karole Armitage (choreography) and furniture designers the Campana brothers (costumes), have mounted an updated version in, of all places, Jersey City.

Last week the artistic director of Festival Ballet Providence and an assistant went to the company’s storage space to fetch the crates full of costumes and found that many were half-empty. They have three weeks to find replacements.