Category: dance

The French software company Dassault Systèmes, working with the dance company Le Théâtre du Corps, has developed a stage environment of screens (including the floor), all equipped with motion sensors, on which a vast array of 3D imagery can be projected for dancers to interact with.

With an initial annual grant of R8 million (roughly $791,000), the City of Johannesburg is effectively assuming funding of the company currently called South African Mzansi Ballet (itself the product of a two-company merger last year). The troupe will be called either Johannesburg Ballet or Johannesburg City Ballet.

Serious students of salsa are flocking from all over to a city once known mostly for a cartel of international drug kingpins. “And even though the music and dance didn’t originate in Cali, this city of 4 million has become a hotbed and leader in the form, a fact well known to aficionados.”

“It’s all digital smoke and mirrors, but the impact is strikingly physical: the thrill of dancers kicking up clouds of autumn leaves as they pirouette; the feeling of entrapment when they seem locked in an Escher-like grid of juddering geometric patterns.”

“‘You have this massive dream to be this ballerina, to be out there onstage performing, and you pour everything into it,’ she said in an interview. ‘Then there is a point where you feel like you are trapped in it and cannot get out. And that is the curse.'”

Judith Mackrell: “Perhaps in normal daylight, or in front of a bathroom mirror, there’s nothing exceptional about the shade to which these men’s teeth have been whitened. But under stage lighting, an obviously bleached smile can take on a neon brightness. And I’m not alone in finding the effect to be disproportionately distracting.”

The California company, now on the rebound after a year of upheaval in 2012 that saw both financial struggles and the acrimonious departure of longtime artistic director Dennis Nahat, will be led by former Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre principal dancer José Manuel Carreño, effective immediately.

“At a time when the culture rewards the most jaded expressions of all that’s wrong with the world, Morris remains an eloquent witness for the plain truths of human experience. Those include the need to poke fun and be silly, which he also does in his dances, often right in the middle of a section that breaks your heart.”