Category: dance

“Glass has experimented with visual forms before: television, live shows, movies. Until he encountered Monica Bill Barnes & Company, dance was the exception. … But when he first saw Monica Bill Barnes, something clicked. There was confetti, goofiness, turtlenecks, pop music. ‘I really loved it,’ he said. … “It felt so much like the work I tried to do on the radio, and what was surprising about that is that you can’t get further from radio than dance.”

The Turner Prize winner personally paints the leotards of all six dancers in Unearthed, a collaboration with choreographer Aakash Odedra that mixes ballet with kathak (North Indian dance) to retell the story of Prometheus and the creation of the first man from clay.

“They all admit to varying degrees of trepidation. There’s no disguising that, collectively, they are a wrinklier, baggier version of their past selves, and there’s much searching for reading glasses whenever they need to consult their rehearsal notes.”

“Egypt’s Dar el-Ifta, a wing of the justice ministry that issues non-binding religious edicts, said Al-Raqisa would destroy the moral structure of the country. Shortly after, producers of the show – hosted by Egypt’s pre-eminent belly-dancing star, Dina – voluntarily announced its suspension.”

“Starting at the beginning of the dancers’ day, each of the five ballet companies – Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada and San Francisco Ballet – will take the lead for a four-hour period streaming live from their headquarters starting with the Australian Ballet in Melbourne. The live link then passes across time zones and cultures from Melbourne to Moscow to London to Toronto to San Francisco.”

“There are so many makeup and lifestyle gurus on YouTube, but there were not many ballet people doing this kind of thing.”

“Typically people don’t see African-American women as ballerinas because they don’t think that we’re soft and feminine and sylph-like. They see us as very powerful and aggressive.”

“Produced by TV geniuses who are also perhaps sadists, the rigorous celebration of dance might be the most demanding talent competition out there, requiring its contestants to leap, pirouette, cha-cha-cha, and toss their dance partners in the air with unrelenting frequency over the course of its summer run each year.”

As part of his residency at NYU’s new Center for Ballet and the Arts, Wiseman and choreographer James Sewell are collaborating on a stage work based on – no, not his dance documentaries, but his 1967 fim Titicut Follies, about the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts.

“Her new organization, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, where she is a scholar in residence, will open this month with the help of a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Ms. Homans said that its goals include establishing ballet as a serious subject of academic inquiry; drawing new voices into a discussion of its past, present and future; and expanding the conversation beyond the confines of the dance world.”