Category: dance

“The 30-year-old Texan native known as ‘Frostine Shake’ blows most ballet stereotypes out the water. Shake might be a classically trained ballerina but she defies all traditional expectations.”

“People don’t know that it’s a ballet, but you can imagine it – because it’s all dark passion, love and landscape – that it sounds really interesting.”

“It’s delightful enough that this ad gives us time to savor Ferri in motion, with her liquid smoothness and undiminished grace. But the ad also puts forth a meaningful narrative about looking back at one’s youth, and realizing that now is even better.”

“Just before he turned 19, he tested positive for HIV, and his dance, ‘Lacrymosa,’ became a reaction to the 1980s AIDS crisis. Many dancers and artists around Stierle were dying from the disease, and as he worked on the ballet, he knew he would become sick too.”

“In the ballet world, pregnancy is no longer the secret that a dancer has to hide from the boss. It’s no longer a potential career-ender. But the question remains: How hard is it for a new mother to turn back into a ballerina? The experience is different for every dancer, but in the case of Maria Kowroski, the statuesque New York City Ballet principal, it’s been humbling.”

“Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet, loves to give his dancers happy surprises. On Tuesday evening, moments before the curtain rose on Hallelujah Junction, Mr. Martins’s brisk, galvanic work set to John Adams, he promoted Taylor Stanley, one of its leads, to principal dancer.”

“‘Ballet is like a push-pull between feeling and logic,’ [Alonzo] King says. ‘Every human being has both, and ballet is a balancing act between the two. If you get too much logic it defies what you might be feeling, and yet with too much feeling things become unbelievable.'”

“‘You’re not stretching your face enough’, explains Crystal Pite, patiently. She demonstrates with a lop-sided grimace that distorts her rather beautiful, open features into a kind of agitated question mark. It’s not the standard rehearsal note from a choreographer to their dancers, but the eight men and women in the studio mimic Pite’s expression as they dance, and an unsettling new energy comes into their bodies. You can feel a shift in the atmosphere of the room.”

The Joffrey Ballet’s Ashton Wheater on running the famous company and what he thinks about ballet audiences.