Category: dance

“Dancing on Ice mentors Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have revealed that the ITV series would end in early 2014″ as the Olympic champions prepare to retire.

“We’re really trying to aim this not as a way to bemoan issues that the dance community might be encountering, but really to look at what opportunities there are, to haul out the good things that might be under-recognized, as well as to provide ways we can respectively climb out of our foxholes.”

“The Metropolitan Opera has decided to disband its resident ballet company, whose roots date back to the opera’s founding in 1883. The 8 remaining dancers of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, down from 16 in 2011, have accepted buyout packages and left the company.”

John Cage once described his partner’s art as “less like an object and more like the weather” – which doesn’t stick around over time. Lizzie Feidelson, the granddaughter of Merce’s first student, writes about the “dance capsules” assembled by the Merce Cunningham Trust to preserve and license his works – and considers what such documentation can, and cannot, record.

“Los Angeles-based contemporary dance company Shaping Sound … [was born] from the Oxygen Network’s All the Right Moves” a docuseries that followed [the four founders] as they endeavored to form their own company.”

Dance philanthropist/publisher Patsy Tarr: “We own two espresso machines, and we use them both. We must drink four lattes apiece each morning. I wake up dead, and that’s how I get going.”

“Of the girls who grow up to become top dancers, few have actually graduated into the upper levels of leadership. Right now, the biggest U.S. ballet companies are run by men — with one exception.”

Javier de Frutos: “The enjoyment in finding a partner with whom we [choreographers] can have a dialogue ends very much the minute you cross the door to the outside world because in this hierarchy you [choreographers] are not equals. Theatres do not consider you equals and the payment is not equal.”

“So on behalf of the dance world, permit me to apologize for the mess you’re entering into. It’s insane. But it’s *incredibly* exciting. The world you thought you were entering into is long dead, and none of the old (anti-intellectual, super-sexist, super-classist and SUPER-racist) rules of dance history need hold true for you.”

Judith Mackrell: “Critics argue that the cosmopolitan make-up of the company threatens a dilution of the British ‘style’. But even that issue is moot. Dance in this country has always been a mongrel product.”