Category: dance

“When the luminaries of world cinema convene at the Palais des Festivals next week to open the annual Cannes Film Festival, they will be treated to a performance by a dance company from Los Angeles.”

Maya Plisetskaya retired formally as a soloist when she was 63, but she never left ballet. On her 70th birthday, she debuted in “Ave Maya,” choreographed for her by Maurice Béjart. She danced “Ave Maya” again for her 80th anniversary and at 82 Plisetskaya, still steady on her high heels, once more danced Béjart’s piece at the Cap Roig Gardens festival in Spain.

“For Ms. Tammany, an artist by day who moonlights as an usher, the job was a reunion of sorts. She designed La Sylphide when Mr. Martins first staged it 30 years ago for the Pennsylvania Ballet, in a production that was later broadcast on public television. But she said she was stunned when Mr. Martins approached her about doing it again at City Ballet.”

“The dance historian Constance Valis Hill claims that tap dance is the most cutting-edge dance form currently to be seen in the United States. What makes tap stand out for Hill is the intense innovation going on in the form, coupled with an attention to emotional and political content.”

“Only a handful of ballerinas have danced into their 50s, and … Ferri said she hoped to blaze a trail for older dancers but suggested that the over-40s face age discrimination in the ballet world. Younger choreographers ‘are unable to see that you are unique and to enjoy that fact. Some of them hardly even look at you in the rehearsal studio.'”

Says one member of Diavolo, Architecture in Motion about founder/artistic director Jacques Heim, “He often puts on a show. He lives to get a rise out of you. And by really nit-picking at what we don’t do so well, he knows he’s going to get something great out of us.” Says another, “On an artistic level, it’s an upstanding trait. But for the younger dancers, it’s a relationship that can potentially be tumultuous.” (video)

“It is strange how we all sorta knew what was happening – and knew it was not right – but did not understand how wrong it was.”

“It’s the news that dance and music fans have awaited for decades: For the first time in more than 20 years, every major Orlando Ballet performance next season will be accompanied by a live orchestra.”

“The trailer includes a flash of Sascha Redetsky (of Center Stage fame), chair throwing, and hyper-charged (and entirely cheesy) lines like, ‘I can’t do anything with some frigid small town virgin!'”

“The delicate textures of her prose, the fractured narratives, the internal music have, quite reasonably, been assumed to be too complex to choreograph. wayne McGregor is challenging that assumption with Woolf Works, his new full-length production for the Royal Ballet.”