Category: dance

“Nothing was simple about Martha Graham–the life or the work.” A new biography highlights both the contradictions and the threads of connection.

What do former ballet dancers do when they travel abraod? Teach dance to kids, of course.

Alastair Macaulay: “That was the year I became a critic; I had no inkling how much stage nakedness awaited me. In experimental modern dance, it is now a widespread condition. A bigger surprise has been to find that sometimes – infrequently, but sometimes – it succeeds.”

“It’s like a bouquet of flowers. In some companies you’ll only find tulips, they might be yellow or red, but they’re still tulips, because the choreographer has an idea of what the bodies performing their work should look like. But my company is a bouquet of lots of things – tulips, roses, even thorns. Their bodies are very different, not just their personalities, there are tall girls, short girls, big boys, thin boys, and I like that.”

“The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is writing her first ballet, based on the classic fairytale of Rapunzel – and has promised to put back the darkness and terror left out of recent sugary visions of pink princesses with long golden hair.”

“After a decade as artistic director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Charlotte Boye-Christensen has announced she will step down at the end of the 2012-2013 season to take on more choreography work, although she doesn’t plan to move out of state.”

“But the brains, and talent, behind the brand new New Zealand Dance Company are determined to break down those barriers. And if the company’s glorious weekend debut at Auckland’s ASB Theatre is an indicator, we will all be singing from the same songbook in no time.”

“The director of the Edinburgh International Festival has defended his decision to invite an Israeli dance company to the city yesterday and said ‘disingenuous’ pro-Palestinian protesters should not disrupt the group’s performance.”

Ayman Safiah, the first (and only) Palestinian man to go through ballet training, just graduated and simply wants to make his art. Can he go home? “The arts in Israel are more segregated than before, but I am not interested in that sort of environment. I don’t like politics having a role in the arts. I just want to dance.”

David Cameron: “A lot of schools were meeting [their target exercise time] by doing things like Indian dance or whatever, that you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport.”