“Underwood’s pre-show ritual used to include a laborious 45 minutes spent caking his ‘nude’ ballet pumps with dark makeup. Once, in Italy, he failed to find the right makeup and struggled to cover his shoes for a performance. ‘I posted an Instagram to some companies, suggesting there should be different coloured shoes. A Russian ballet company replied, saying, ‘You’re black. You should wear black shoes.’ But one major manufacturer, Bloch, responded by creating a line in darker tones.”
Category: dance
In Kansas City, The Ailey Group’s Second Home Has A Mission Beyond Dance
“For the third year in a row, the organization will convene a day-long symposium and town-hall meeting on Race, Place and Diversity. Over the last two years, a few hundred people have gathered for lunch, followed by break-out sessions and panels and an evening town hall to try to tackle these tension-filled topics.”
A Precipitous Drop In Dance Attendance In NYC
“A 20% decrease in the number of paid attendees at live performances emerged in the study, to be released Friday by the advocacy group Dance/NYC. The study looked at 172 dance organizations over a six-year period. The audience decline appears to have been led by drops at the largest organizations, those with budgets of more than $5 million.”
So How Hard Is It To Work As A Black Ballerina?
“Many company directors – consciously or not – think, ‘I don’t know if it looks like ballet if it doesn’t look like 12 identical swans.’ … While dancers and company directors … say it’s extremely difficult for black dancers to get a job in a ballet company – especially if that company already has a ‘token’ black ballerina – they acknowledge that the task of diversifying dance troupes is made more difficult by social attitudes besides racial division.”
“I’m Full Of Adrenaline So I’m Great, But In One Hour, I’m Going To Drop”: Talking To A New ABT Principal Minutes After His Debut
“After the final curtain on Wednesday, still drenched in sweat, feet red and raw, [Alban] Lendorf sat down in his dressing room to talk about his first night as a full member of the company. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.”
Dance’s Bessie Awards Finally Include (A Little) Money
“The hard work of dancing is too often undernoticed and underpaid. Enter the New York Dance and Performance Awards, better known as the Bessies, which bestow some much needed recognition and a touch of glamour on the profession once a year, if not a whole lot of money – though this year’s ceremony, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday, began with an announcement that all nominees would receive a $500 honorarium. (It’s a start?)”
An Exotic Dancer Tells How Work Has Changed In The Internet Era
“A lot of people don’t come out for the companionship anymore. They can get it in other ways for much cheaper. Why go to a strip club just to live out the fantasy, when you can pay $100 dollars for somebody to sleep with you for the evening and actually get the fantasy come to you? … We don’t really get a lot of people who are paying customers anymore. We get a lot of people who are looking for girlfriends.”
Very Brave Choreographer Creates Dance Starring Art Museum Staffers
“When the French choreographer Jérôme Bel unveils MoMA Dance Company next week at the Museum of Modern Art, the 25 performers will have had just three rehearsals as a group. Mr. Bel is the first to acknowledge that the experiment, as he calls it, might not work.”
Cuba’s National Ballet School Enrolls Its First American Student
“Communist-led Cuba is renowned for its rigorous, state-subsidized ballet education and has produced an outsized share of dance stars, such as Carlos Acosta and José Manuel Carreño, for a small island of 11 million inhabitants. Cuba’s National Ballet School, which claims to be the world’s largest with 3,000 students, has long trained many foreign dancers. But no American had joined its full-time program during the half-century long conflict between Cuba and United States.” Until now.
Columbia’s New Doctoral Program In Dance Education Will Train Teachers Of Teachers
“As the decline of arts education in recent decades has increasingly alarmed cultural institutions, a new $4.36 million gift aims to bolster dance education by taking a different approach. The gift, from Jody Gottfried Arnhold and her husband, John, will allow Teachers College at Columbia University to establish a new doctoral program to train those who train dance teachers.”