Category: dance

The Melbourne property – full price $4.7 million – will be used as a boarding school for the company’s young students. Yet with most of Australia’s large arts organizations having to absorb big budget cuts, this particular budgetary line item has raised eyebrows.

“An advertisement was posted on a Facebook group for professional dancers to take part in a one-day rehearsal and subsequent flash mob as part of a viral video for the brand. However, when Coca-Cola was confronted about its plans, it emerged that the only payment dancers would receive would be gifts and soft drinks.”

At issue is a rule that civil servants may not be paid for more than 60 hours of overtime per year (time off is offered instead) – a rule that the company’s dancers and tech staff insist is unworkable for a low-pay performing arts company with an off season. (in Spanish)

Jeffrey Gantz sees what’s involved in the 9:00 am-to-11:30 pm daily routine of artistic director Mikko Nissinen.

“The unnamed dancers – one male, one female – have pulled out of the tour which begins next week. The snub will embarrass Mr Putin, as Russia, boasting the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) in St Petersburg, is widely considered the home of classical ballet.”

“Figuring out how to remake 104 of the costumes that the designer Barbara Karinska created more than a half-century ago for the fairies and foolish mortals of George Balanchine’s ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Tuesday night’s opening performance required detective work, millinery archaeology and a scavenger hunt for material that eventually led to three continents.”

“As humans we are compelled to create, to play, to love and to communicate through movement — after all, gesture was our first language. Dance gives us life and brings us joy and hope.”

“On and off for nearly 20 years, Bruce Wood was our most important figure in contemporary dance. He brought cutting-edge clarity, style and humor to North Texas dance. He choreographed ambitious works to Maurice Ravel and Philip Glass but also tongue-in-cheek dances to Lyle Lovett songs. Wood toured his Texas dancers to acclaim in LA and New York.”

“Most aspiring dancers and choreographers spend their teens perfecting their arabesques in ballet class or their spins in hip-hop. But when … Rosie Herrera was 16, she was learning a very different side of dance – as a showgirl strutting the stage of the Little Havana theatrical cabaret Teatro de Bellas Artes in fishnet stockings, high heels, feathered headdress and not much else.”

“In the studio work, we explore the effects of physical forces on our bodies and use the scientific concepts as points of departure for creating choreographic studies.”