Category: dance

The laws being what they and all…

“The worst thing is the snobbery of this place, that ‘we are the best because we are the Bolshoi'”. That I hate. And maybe I did something intentionally or unintentionally to challenge this, by inviting guest artists, or giving them material that they had to struggle to work on, to discover their weak sides.” A look back at an interview from 2008.

“Mr. Howard’s pedagogy, unorthodox in its day, entailed a kinesthetic approach, in which dancers were taught to rely less on external feedback from the mirror and more on the minute internal signals that telegraph the position of the head, limbs and torso in space.”

The dance is mostly forgotten in Cuba, but “growing numbers of children and young Mexicans flock to festivals and join classes to learn the elegant steps and dress up in the flamboyant costumes of danzón.”

“School dropouts and petty — and not so petty — criminals, they have been, as one youth worker put it, ‘sentenced to dance.'”

“By tradition there is only ever one great male ballet dancer at a time; just one can be the most athletically, physically and artistically gifted, and unfairly beautiful to boot.”

“For the past month, 17-year-old July Yinger of Denver has been in Moscow, training at the world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet. Her day begins formally at 9 a.m. with three hours of ballet and gymnastics, followed by four hours of Russian language study. Afternoons and evenings are full of excursions around Moscow.”

“Mr. Abramov’s people are ordinary-looking middle-aged Russian women in cloth coats, and their expressions are all business. They assemble on the stairs, and as the first curtain approaches, they break up into formations, like synchronized swimmers, and vanish into the stream of people heading to their seats. … [Abramov’s] job is to engineer applause and ovations, on the basis of secret agreements with dancers, using associates planted in the audience.”

“In a country well known for its deeply-ingrained machismo, a group of pioneering young male ballet dancers have been tackling the country’s traditional values as they learn to dance. Ivonne Robles Gil has played a major role in breaking down ingrained ideas about traditional male roles by training more than 50 young men in classical dance.”

Sergei Filin, who has been at a clinic in Germany for months recovering from the acid attack he suffered in Moscow in January, made a surprise visit to London to watch his dancers perform at the Royal Opera House.