Category: dance

“[He] comes with a seemingly gold-plated reputation: 1998 Turner prize winner, British representative at the 50th Venice Biennale, paintings held in some of the world’s great collections.” (In the US, he’s mostly remembered for his painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporated elephant dung and photos of genitalia and over which Rudy Giuliani threatened to shut down the Brooklyn Museum.) “But two years ago, when [Ofili] agreed to design a new production for the Royal Ballet, he suffered a flash of paranoia.”

Following the massive 2010 temblor, choreographer Jeanguy Saintus and his dance company were in crisis: their studio was destroyed, their own lives were chaotic, and their paying students had mostly fled the country. “But 2 years later, Ayikodans [is] … performing to rapt audiences in Miami and earning the kind of rave reviews and cultural attention and support Saintus strived so long for.”

Pop quiz: What was the very first recorded dance work to receive a US copyright?

An episode of the newly-revived South Bank Show looks at the way Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov – followed, in the next generation, by the likes of Carlos Acosta (now a genuine sex symbol in England) – completely transformed the role of male artists in classical ballet.

“The goal of Sunday is to leave my home as little as possible. So even if it only looks like I have a jar of mustard and an old film canister in my refrigerator, I can come up with a pretty good meal because I’m a pretty good cook.”

“Paradoxically, it’s also fair to say that the company’s doldrums, so evident in the 1990s and well into this century, show no sign of abating. The company still fields in prima roles a number of women who dance as twinkle-toed soubrettes, devoid of adult decisiveness, musicianly phrasing or linear beauty.”

John Travolta.

A new video showing preparations for the company’s new collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which is “described as a cyborg of a dance that takes place in a mirrored world somewhere between Tron and Metropolis.”

“At that moment … my affection for Bunheads, the dance-themed dramedy that debuted Monday night, became cautious infatuation. Shall I list its seductions? The sour tempers! The insider dance jokes! The caustic comebacks! (Gaudily dressed hooker to a dejected Simms: ‘Who died?’ Simms: ‘Your fashion sense.’)”

Jodee Nimerichter spent years working alongside longtime ADF director Charles Reinhart, whose programming had come to rely heavily on artists who made it big in the 1980s and ’90s, such as the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Pilobolus. Nimerichter has re-engaged those two, but she’s already freshening things up with, among other things, a long-overdue ADF appearance by Stephen Petronio and his company.