Category: dance

“What could be better than your own hit reality TV show? Having a local audience that knows about it. Season two of Breaking Pointe, a hit reality TV show filmed by the BBC in Utah and starring artists from Ballet West, premieres July 22 in the United States on the CW network and in Germany, Australia and Brazil.”

“But whether in the flesh or on-screen, real flight crews don’t want you thinking too hard about the what-ifs … so their moves in safety demos are stylized and abstract. … The life-vest pantomime is a smooth upper-body ballet, each move linked to the next. You’re lulled by the legato; your focus is on the confident visual swirl – inflation tubes, lipstick, finger placement – not on the threat of drowning that underlies it.’

“The death of Viktor Sedov, 65, is the latest bad news in a mounting string of tragedies involving the historic theater that have led to chatter about a supposed ‘Curse of the Bolshoi.'”

Mark Dendy: “We’ve discarded a lot of our rituals as a culture. We don’t have this kind of meaningful thing anymore, where everyone comes down to the watering hole in the morning and dances for the strength and courage to keep on going.”

“This aesthetic, the creators explain, acts as a blank slate, an erasing mechanism through which the personality of each dancer emerges. Physical traits disappear, and what’s left is just a family of open hearts undoing themselves.”

Tamara Rojo: “It’s not a healthy environment of artistic criteria that’s at work, but a network of people pushing their protégés – which is unfair, and can become violent.”

And you know what’s at fault? Billy Elliot. Seriously: Billy Elliot.

“Rojo’s argument … is a serious one, directed at the differences between male and female choreographers and the reasons why so few of the latter are working in ballet. Yet with one effortless flick of a porn reference, she’s spun this rather specialist issue right into the middle of the media’s attention.”

Hong Kong-born and U.S.-educated, Willy Tsao founded his hometown’s first contemporary dance company in 1979. (He kept it afloat with money from his family’s business.) He went on to create the first professional modern dance company in the People’s Republic (1991 in Guangzhou), and in 2005 he established Beijing Dance LDTX.

“When Charlotte Boye-Christensen retired in April after a decade as the artistic leader of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, she didn’t so much step down as across – taking the reins of a new interdisciplinary dance and arts company called NOW ID.” The new group gives its first performances next weekend – just a day after Boye-Christensen and her co-director get married.