Category: dance

“The phrase heebie-jeebies was, as far as we can tell, coined in 1923 by cartoonist Billy DeBeck in his popular comic strip Barney Google. Before long, the phrase was popping up all over … [it] implied eccentric movement and vague associations with mental disturbance, which made it the perfect name for a dance that aimed to satisfy the mid-1920s fascination with cutting loose and stepping out of convention for a couple of happy minutes.”

Who but Matthew Neenan, co-founder of Philadelphia’s BalletX and resident choreographer of the Pennsylvania Ballet, could pull off a classical dance work about a key event in the history of airmail?

At the hip-hop dancing world championships, U.S. crews weren’t completely shut out, but their moves have been, as the tournament’s spokesman put it, “exported and perfected elsewhere.”

“Jonathan Ollivier, 38, was killed as he rode his motorbike through Clerkenwell in central London on Sunday, Scotland Yard said.”

“I was just theorizing that the only way performing will ever make sense is if I dance until I die. If I get a little done every year, at some point I’m going to be four generations older than the children dancing. Then, I think there will be a connection.”

South Africa’s “largest ballet company said investigations have been carried out and have kicked up concerns about poor corporate governance, financial management and general oversight of the company.”

“$3.1 million in box office sales, the highest ticket revenue for the company in at least two decades (as far back as the company’s records go). … Total season attendance approached 72,000.”

It was a decade that saw the loss of major dance figures. But it was also a decade in which dance renewed and reinvented itself…

“Two recently fired directors with Citie Ballet plan to take the organization to court as ongoing infighting at Edmonton’s small professional ballet organization has resulted in dancers leaving and its reputation, according to some, to be tarnished.”

“I never associated myself with that troupe, which has its own, clearly expressed characteristic, its own style. I didn’t think of experimenting with that repertoire. I thought that I would never dance English ballets, that they don’t suit me! But two years ago Kevin O’Hara, the director of the Royal Ballet, invited me to dance Swan Lake.”