Category: dance

He’s only the third artistic director that Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has ever had, and not everyone has been happy to see him add works like Hofesh Schechter’s bleak and aggressive Uprising to the repertoire of a company whose brand is so tied up with inspiration and uplift. Says Battle, “I can’t imagine living anywhere other than on the edge – that place where you’re understood and misunderstood with the same amount of passion.”

“I think of the choreographic practice as the embodied movement of ideas through space and time, a definition that holds equally well if you’re making dances for stages (which we do frequently) or if you’re facilitating a difficult meeting. We’re superattuned to how folks perform in organizations, and I mean “perform” on all registers. How folks speak, who interrupts whom, that nobody seems to like sitting next to Ted – these are all important data points for us.”

“Change is afoot at Atlanta Ballet under artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin, with a new ballet master and company members, plus a major upswing in one dancer’s career.”

“Teachers and advocates say Psicoballet, like most forms of dance, improves balance, posture and mobility, while also boosting self-esteem and reducing anxiety and depression. According to estimates, the Cuban dance therapy has benefited over 20,000 people in the last four decades and has spread to 17 nations, including Mexico, where it arrived in 1984.”

“I usually don’t work with music that has already been choreographed (especially not a work that is historically iconic), but I had an intuition that there was room for an entirely alternate exploration of the same piece of music. … I deliberately wanted to invert the conventional ‘romantic ballet’ setup.”

“‘Discovering something great choreographers created is unlocking a piece of romanticized history,’ said Ms. Jones, an associate professor of dance here at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. ‘With work considered lost, curiosity compels me to dig into the past and reveal some of that mystery.'”

“‘Nobody threw us out the door,’ Gleason said. But Gleason said the 25-by-30 foot rehearsal room above the hardware store, which an athletic dancer could bound across in about three leaps, is too small to train dancers for professional careers.”

“Binet gave a killer speech on what he wants the ballet of his generation to look like: non-hierarchical, non-heteronormative and non-subscribing to gender stereotypes.”

“Through a heavy VR goggles and headphones, the viewer is not served the choreography; he must turn his head to discover that the group of dancers – in white tutu and pointe shoes; so far, the picture is familiar – is arranged in a circle.” [Translated from Dutch using Google Translate]

Says co-founder Marco Adel, “We continue to be assailed and threatened on social networking media for opening this school. Those who criticise us say this school is against traditions. They claim it also spreads debauchery and encourages nudity. This is not true at all because art develops humans and refines their morals.”