Category: dance

“The State Street Ballet, from Santa Barbara, California, was traveling from Spokane, Washington to Durango for their performance of The Nutcracker when they found themselves with a five-hour layover with nothing to do.” When they posted the video on Facebook, it got 1.8 million views in under an hour.”

“I was told by the director of the Royal Ballet School that they are getting more applications for boys than they are for girls – it’s amazing!”

Sarah Hay, whose regular gig is with the ballet at the Semperoper Dresden, says that when she was studying in New York, “I had a lot of controversy about my figure.” One teacher even pulled her offstage, told her, “Your breasts are distracting me,” and gave her a sports bra to put on.

The 45-year-old company “announced Wednesday that Eduardo Vilaro, its artistic director since 2009, would become its chief executive officer as well. … [He] has experience running both the artistic and managerial sides of a company: he served in both roles for the Luna Negra Dance Theater in Chicago, which he founded in 1999.”

Louise Lecavalier, longtime member of La La La Human Steps: “A choreographer once told me, we all have our tricks in our pockets. I thought: I have nothing in my pockets. … But then I worked with Benoît Lachambre, who encouraged me to create choreography. He would arrive at the studio and find me already dancing my guts out, and helped me feel that movement was pouring out of me, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me what to do.”

“Redesigning the dance major is an example of how Mills can retain a contemporary liberal arts education in a competitive environment that demands continuous innovation,” President Alecia DeCoudreaux said.

“[Ellen Robbins] has been teaching modern dance to children as young as 5 since the 1970s. She has a knack for tapping into the creativity of her students while painlessly introducing the rudiments of music theory and compositional structure … Even the 5-year-olds are given a chance to make up their own dances. By the time they are teenagers, they’re composing multipart group works.”

“The audience took a collective breath when Baryshnikov first appeared on stage. He looks not the athlete he once was but a gaunt, bedraggled traveler, suitcase in hand, seated on a wooden bench below the broken fuse of a dilapidated Art Deco apartment with large, dusty window panes.”

“Ballet San Antonio has named ballet master Willy Shives, who has spent the past 16 years with the famed Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, as its new artistic director. Shives succeeds Gabriel Zertuche, who left the company in August alongside Executive Director Courtney Mauro Barker.”