Category: dance

“Couples are everywhere, moving fast and vying for the judges’ attention. You have no control over the music – please, you think, just let it have a discernible beat. You’re counting – ‘1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8’ in your head, and your teacher is hissing in your ear to get your head back out of her space and keep your frame up.”

“Cisneros was a pigeon-toed swan. Her left hip was too tight and her left foot was pigeon-toed — potential career-enders because ballet is grounded in outward rotation. She overcame what could have become a disability through a brutal work ethic.”

“The petition states an ‘outright rejection’ of the idea of joint directors, demanding a single candidate ‘with a clear artistic vision and relevant experience.’ It contends that these appointments, announced three years in advance, are politically rather than artistically motivated.”

It was at the Paris Opera in 1862, still the age of gas lighting, which is not a good combination with tutu skirts.

The Russian ballerina Diana Vishneva, a principal with American Ballet Theater since 2005, will give her farewell performances with the company [next June] … Ms. Vishneva, 40, is also a principal dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, and will remain with that company.”

“Performers from the Royal Ballet, the Washington Ballet and the Staatsballett Berlin – who all trained under the Royal Academy of Dance – have joined forces to call on parents not to push their children into starting pointe work just because some of their peers might have.” Says one, “Starting too early can cause enormous damage.”

An ugly, months-long saga that saw renowned dancer-choreographer Johan Kobborg – engaged as artistic director in 2014 to bring the ballet company at the Bucharest National Opera up to top international standards – demoted without warning to corps de ballet member, a theatened exodus of foreign dancers (whose Romanian colleagues yelled “Foreigners out! at them), Kobborg first brought back and then barred from the building, and the resignations of two opera house general managers (one after one day) and Romania’s culture minister, is now over. The house’s current (third) interim director, Beatrice Rancea, says that, regardless of what position her predecessors may have offered Kobborg, Romanian law does not permit a foreigner to hold the title of artistic director at the company and that Kobborg refused to stay on with a lesser title. His successor, now “artistic coordinator,” is Italian choreographer Renato Zanella – whose pay, Rancea pointed out, will not be as high as Kobborg’s was. (That was another point of conflict with Romanians in the company.) Another Italian, Marcello Mottadelli, has been appointed music director at the opera house. (in Romanian; Google Translate version here)

“Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller had last week appointed Waltz and Swedish ballet chief Johannes Öhman as co-directors of Germany’s largest ballet company from the 2019/2020 season on. But in a scathing petition posted on the company’s homepage on Sunday, the dancers said: ‘Unfortunately, the appointment has to be compared to an appointment of a tennis trainer as a football coach or an art museum director as an orchestral director.'”

Brenda Bufalino: “When writers cover other forms of dance they speak about the particulars that make up a satisfying performance. They are equipped to reference past works and compare specific dances from a choreographer’s repertory. In contrast, tap dance to date has been written about as if it were a folk dance. Many critics have created a hierarchy of authenticity that keeps tap dancers competing on the street corner. Wouldn’t it be helpful to share with the public the subtleties and techniques of tap dance?”