Category: dance

When the young dancers ready to remake Dirty Dancing find out it’s all over, they get together and “dance it out.”

“Michaela DePrince was little more than a toddler when she saw her first ballerina – an image in a magazine page blown against the gate of the orphanage where she ended up during Sierra Leone’s civil war. It showed an American ballet dancer posed on tip toe. … She wished “to become this exact person. … I saw hope in it. And I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn’t have any place to put it.”

“Campaigners are planning disruption at the Edinburgh International Festival of performances by Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company.” Scottish protesters argue that “Batsheva [is] ‘actively complicit in whitewashing Israeli human-rights abuses, apartheid, and occupation of Palestinian land’ because it receives funding from the Israeli government.”

“Until the mid-1970s, there was no copyright protection for choreography … When Congress added ‘choreographic works’ to the Copyright Act in 1976, it seemed to give our art some credibility and respect. But copyright protection has been both a boon and curse.”

“Men shown videos of women dancing and walking were most attracted to their moves when the women were close to ovulation.”

While “Bunheads” is fiction and “Breaking Pointe” is based on reality, both succeed in revealing what dancers endure as youngsters and professionals

“William Whitener, artistic director of the Kansas City Ballet since 1996 and the man who helped modernize the company’s approach to dance, will step down at the end of the 2012-13 season.”

“Considering that he is now 39, and that in recent years injuries (multiple knee operations) and other commitments — including serving as dean at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and, since last year, as artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet — have interrupted his performing career, he might have been cautious. But cautious has never been Mr. Stiefel’s style.”

Choreographer Jack Fervor, who found it devastating (and freeing) to revisit his childhood for a new collaboration with a sculptor who had a similarly terrible youth: “After every performance, audience members come up, gay and straight, who say they identify with the isolation and fear that we felt. That’s my intention. I make my work so that people don’t feel as lonely as I have.”

“The New York City Ballet’s residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center will be cut to one week in 2013, with other visiting ballet companies filling the gap for week two. The reason: Both SPAC and the NYCB say they can’t afford a longer stay.”