Category: dance

“[Jewish folk dance is] the DNA of my dance education. I have been to Orthodox weddings. I know how it looks like, how it has to feel. I didn’t have to research. My life is the research.” As for most of Robbins’s original, “for my taste, it was not energetic enough.”

The choreographer Stephen Petronio, who is beginning a $3 million fund-raising campaign to establish a choreographic residency program in Pawling, N.Y., announced Thursday that he had received a lead gift from the artist Anish Kapoor, who donated a sculpture that is expected to fetch $1 million in a private sale.

“Rambert, which turns 90 this year, has discovered many of Britain’s leading choreographers, taken a long journey from the notoriously tiny Mercury Theatre to shiny new premises on London’s South Bank, and transformed itself from a ballet troupe into the UK’s flagship contemporary company.”

“It has already transformed itself from a dance school in Rockville, Md., to an organization with ambition to present contemporary dance and help choreographers develop new works. Now American Dance Institute is moving north: It announced on Tuesday that it would build a new headquarters at a former lumberyard in Catskill, N.Y.”

“Scientists gave little thought to the neurological effects of dance until relatively recently, when researchers began to investigate the complex mental coordination that dance requires.”

“The Bolshoi is not just a theatre: it’s a cultural brand that is key to Russia’s image of itself … and the Kremlin have been reluctant to leave its running to mere specialists. One of the theatre’s harassed-looking board members claims that 40% of its artistic and managerial decisions have historically been controlled by politicians.”

“A Facebook user recently commented that the Eagles had ‘played like they were wearing tutus!!!’ Our response: ‘With all due respect to the Eagles, let’s take a minute to look at what our tutu wearing women have done this month.'”

“It isn’t uncommon for dancers to generate gigs outside of their main company’s season: Ballet Theatre dancers work on a 36-week contract, leaving 16 unpaid weeks when it is easy to fall out of shape.”

“How these dancers are cast is not always based on merit. It’s about who you are loyal to and who you butter up, and who patronises you. That’s the legacy of a communist past. … I asked [Bolshoi Theater chief Vladimir Urin] once if he believed in democracy and he just laughed at me, which is a sort of communist disposition. People of his generation are quite, shall we say ambivalent about democratic principles.”

After The Apple Tree in 2006, “it was all upward – 2007’s In the Heights, for which he won a Tony; 2009’s 9 to 5; 2012’s Bring It On: The Musical (in which he debuted as a director), as well as the heralded revival of Annie that same year. And now there’s Hamilton.”