Category: dance

“I was still amazed at the high standard of dancers. Every company has its own strengths and atmosphere but the RNZB is very strong. The dancers are hungry to learn, they are looking for coaching, they want to be the best they can. I always tell dancers that to be good you have to put your heart in your legs, that you can’t dance without heart, and that’s what I’ve found here.”

“George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer in the art, believed that ballet needed no external subject to give it meaning: We can’t dance synonyms, he liked to say. But one major part of the history of ballet, of course, is a history of attempts at various synonyms.”

“After she retired from the stage, María Fux, Argentina’s prima ballerina assoluta during the 1940s and ’50s, began teaching classes of blind and disabled students to dance, getting their bodies to do far more than had been thought possible.”

“Yes, the musicians have to keep an underlying dance pulse going if they want listeners to get out of their chairs and shake their hips. But the venue also has to provide an open space where that can happen without blocking the view of others. And the audience has to be able to identify the beat within a jazz number that has a lot of different moving parts. In New Orleans, audiences are trained by family and friends to hear that dance pulse from an early age.”

“His new ballet, Woolf Works, which is derived from, or based on – the verbs being precisely the problem – three novels by Virginia Woolf, recently premiered at Covent Garden in London. It is a brilliant, uneven, tender piece – and it offers one way of thinking about [a] constant conundrum for the art of ballet:” that, as George Balanchine put it, “We can’t dance synonyms.”

In the twentieth century there was a strong anti-narrative trend in some quarters of the ballet world: storytelling was seen as corny. Consequently, a great deal of the mime, or hand-talk, in the nineteenth-century ballets was dropped. According to Alexei Ratmansky, this was definitely the case with “The Sleeping Beauty.” In the movement score he found much more mime than we see in today’s productions, and he says he restored every scrap of it.

“This year’s Benois de la Danse, which took place over two days at the end of May in its traditional home, the Bolshoi Theater, was particularly marked by the absence of award winners.”

“It shows how to perform a variety of moves for the country’s traditional mass dance events, like this one, that took place on May 1 in Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang.”

“If you want to know what next year will look like, he said, look no further than this week’s program … New works from highly sought-after choreographers are ‘all going to define the future of the company and what kind of rep we will do,’ he says.”

“Lauren Lovette and Anthony Huxley, who had been soloists with the company, were promoted on Sunday afternoon by Peter Martins, its ballet master in chief.”