Category: dance

“In a democracy, dancers have the right to express any ideas, including sexual ones. Sexuality is in the mind of the beholder and can be read into any dance, especially given that the human body is the instrument of both dance and sex. Now exotic dance is under attack. What dance might be next?”

“In the United States, should any government tax strip clubs where choreographed adult entertainment like exotic dancing is featured when it has a law providing a tax exemption for ‘live, dramatic, choreographic or musical performance,’ whether it is nonprofit or for profit? … The question at stake is who decides whether exotic dance, or any other dance genre, is a ‘choreographic’ performance.”

Sarah Kaufman: “[The film’s] director and choreographer worked closely together to create a magical, stylized world of piercing, intensified feeling. In the dance world, such a feat is all left to one person, the choreographer or company director. … But making a work of living, urgent and irresistible theater, where every moment works, not just the danced ones, is often simply not in the dance specialist’s arsenal.

“This year, a single performance stood out as gut-wrenching and unforgettable: Nadia Beugré, from Côte d’Ivoire, delivered an almost unbearably compelling solo titled Quartiers Libres, wherein pleasure and pain, freedom and oppression, intermingled.”

“‘I never thought that they would find me interesting enough to be the one,’ said the villain of the first season of Breaking Pointe. ‘The first two episodes, the backlash I got on Twitter and Facebook – I just shut down. I couldn’t stop obsessing about what people were saying about me. I could barely watch it.'”

Former Joffrey star Adam Sklute, now artistic director of Utah’s Ballet West: “[He] screamed out to me from the front of the studio, saying, ‘You there. You, with the spatulas at the end of your legs. Get out of my sight.’ Some dancers might have been crushed, but I thought, ‘Gee, he noticed me,’ so I knew I was doing something right.”

“Ballet is, in the words of Homans, ‘full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement.’ And so are games. Ballet straddles the world of music, literature, art and performance. And so do games. And much like the way video games have struggled to separate themselves from sports, board games and toys, early ballet struggled to separate itself from music; dance was not seen as a distinct art form.”

“Starting in early January checks from $1,000 to $5,000 will go out to companies, choreographers and theaters knocked back on their heels by the destruction and flooding.”

“The influence of Judson on current dance artists is as inspirational as it is oppressive. What is there left to rebel against? It’s often the kid with the cool parents who has the hardest time breaking free.”