Category: dance

“The shoes are equipped with accelerometer sensors that correspond to an app on the users’ smartphone. The app illustrates the proper way to do certain dance moves and gives live feedback to let you know if you’re really shakin’ ’em down.”

“‘Fifth Wall,’ the title of the work and a new application available only for iPads, is the latest offering from the 2wice Arts Foundation, which published a revered biennial magazine of the same name. Its last print issue appeared in 2009. Now 2wice has gone digital, but not in the usual way that magazine applications transfer copy from one format to the other. Essentially the iPad app — in the form of an interactive performance — is the new issue of the magazine.”

“The commission, reported by bdonline, will convert the abandoned School of Ballet, which was set up as one of four national arts schools by Fidel Castro but was never completed.”

Artistic director Kevin McKenzie: “The composition of the company has always been about 60 percent American and 40 percent everywhere else. And what became American about everybody was, the Cubans started to look at the English who started to look at the Russians and thought, if I could partner like that and jump like that and turn like that. That’s what’s American. They reinvent themselves.”

“You can hardly change the channels these days without seeing a pasa doble, a pirouette or a pop.”

“Good news for the Joffrey Ballet. The company is expanding its roster of dancers to 45. The three new company members have widely diverse backgrounds” – there’s a woman from the southern US who apprenticed in Orlando, a Japanese man who studied at Britain’s Royal Ballet School, and a French male graduate of the Paris Opera Ballet’s academy.

Nan Giordano, artistic director of the company now called Giordano Dance Chicago (and daughter of the troupe’s founder): “We’ve grown into a repertory company. Our mission has always been to take audiences on a journey we call jazz dance. But I don’t think that means we necessarily have to perform to jazz music.”

“Investors sunk more than $10 million into a long-abandoned Toys R Us store near Disneyland, transforming the 40,000-square-foot building into a lavish venue that seats 950 people. According to Gelabert, “Battle of the Dance” employed 200, including more than 40 dancers as well as musicians, magicians, comedians, acrobats and other artists.”

Tiffany Glenn “was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in June 2006 at the age of 27. After undergoing a mastectomy, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, she returned to Ballet San Jose with a shaved head to dance in the Nutcracker that December.” She went on to choreograph a ballet for the company in 2009 and kept dancing until this spring.