Category: dance

“In 1941, when she was 22, Mona Inglesby founded the International Ballet. For the next 13 years, through some of the worst austerity Britain has ever known, she ran it entirely on the basis of its box-office success. It’s a feat never repeated by any ballet company since.”

“One goal of his L.A. Dance Project, formed earlier this year, is to present dance outside of the traditional confines of theater walls” – a goal he began realizing this summer in a pair of site-specific duets with artist Mark Bradford at MOCA. Now there’s “a video from the show on MOCAtv, the museum’s YouTube channel that launched in October.”

“First and foremost, it is [Tchaikovsky’s] score.” But it’s more than that: “It is taking us back to a time of innocence, a time with no worries, a time when you believe completely in Christmas.”

“The choreographic whizz kid Liam Scarlett, 26, has just landed the newest job [at the Royal Ballet]: artist-in-residence, a post created especially for him. … For several years, the wide-eyed, tousle-haired dancer – he looks a little like Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins – has been increasingly recognised as the ‘great white hope’ of British choreography.”

“The turmoil continues at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Joanne Van Ness Menashe OBT vice-president of development and marketing is leaving the company, hard on the heels of artistic director Christopher Stowell’s surprise resignation. … OBT now needs to fill its top artistic, development, marketing and finance posts.” (The executive director position was eliminated over the summer.)

“Why would he want to oversee the dismantling of the company he’s built, the departure of the dancers he brought to OBT and trained, (everyone now in the company except for Roper), the mothballing of much of the repertoire a downsizing of the company and potential change of performance space would mean?”

“As Charlotte Boye-Christensen prepares to step down as artistic director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, the question arises: Who has ownership and control over the choreography she produced while an employee? … Boye-Christensen wants control over which of her dance works continue to represent her in the company’s repertoire.” The company’s response: “This is not something we wish to discuss at this time.”

“[The] system here, which is a civil servant one, can really breed complacency. … When I came, the company took class when they felt like it. … I said, you are wasting the opportunity to improve. What I learned is that you can’t just tell people what to do in Denmark. You have to explain your point of view, why, and what good can come out of it.”

The Frevo, a Brazilian carnival dance from the city of Recife, “will now stand alongside the likes of the Argentine tango, the Spanish flamenco and the French gastronomic meal, all protected by the U.N. as pieces of the world’s ‘intangible heritage.'”

“People think of New York as a cold, big-city environment, but there are lots of places that feel so neighborhoody. Everybody knows you; they know what you do. That means a lot to me.”