Category: dance

“Though a number of big-time ballet figures – Frederick Ashton, Agnes de Mille – have said that Anna Pavlova was their inspiration, their thunderbolt, some people still regard her as a chocolate-box ballerina … But in 1916, [she] starred in a feature film, The Dumb Girl of Portici, … and it shows a very different side of Pavlova.”

“The abstract scene with its single spotlight could represent a church in Rwanda, a labor camp in Cambodia or a gas chamber in Europe. Choreographer Stephen Mills said his ballet, entitled Light/The Holocaust and Humanity Project, is about all of those places – and any place – where intolerance turns into violence and genocide.”

“The Olympic [opening and closing] ceremonies offer a really good example of what investing in dance education can achieve. If it were to be sidelined, young people in the future may not have the same opportunities to participate in dance.”

“This is show business, first and foremost. I’m an artist. I was trained in Vaganova ballet my whole life. But ballet is a dying art form, and something has to change. Abstract contemporary dance is unfair to the audience. It is 100 percent imperative to put the audience’s enjoyment first.”

In an excerpt from his book Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations, Chris Berdik considers the wave of compulsive dancing that swept Strasbourg in the summer of 1518 – and whether it might be an example of Mass Psychogenic Illness, a large-scale manifestation of the “nocebo effect”, the placebo effect’s evil twin.

“The game of musical chairs launched by New York City Opera last year when it left Lincoln Center is going at least one more round: American Ballet Theatre … has signed a three-year deal to perform at the David H. Koch Theater, starting in October 2013 … The change means that the company will terminate its fall seasons at New York City Center, on West 55th Street, which it began in 1997.”

“The owners of Nite Moves, an exotic dance club near Albany, New York, had sought to have pole dancing and private lap dances qualified as tax exempt since revenue collected from ‘dramatic or musical arts performances’ is not taxable under state law. But the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, decided against the club in a 4-3 ruling handed down on Tuesday.”

“One of the key issues facing British ballet is the difficulty of building audiences for new choreography, especially in the smaller towns and cities, where 19th-century classics remain the default option at the box office. Would it be impossible for companies such as ENB, the Royal and Birmingham Royal Ballet to address this by collaborating on limited tours of small-scale, contemporary ballets?”

One of the first things new artistic director Anouk van Dijk did when she took over the Melbourne modern dance company from founder Gideon Obarzanek was to hold open auditions. Three of the troupe’s eight new members talk about their new jobs (and Alya Manzart explains how he cut his head open).

“Our experience of ballet illusion has changed, and paradoxically it’s this change – not just the staying-the-sameness of Swan Lake – that brings us back.”