Category: dance

The English National Ballet star, about to turn 41, “and her husband (an older English theatrical lighting expert) have a second home in Prague, where she runs a season of international ballet classes each summer. She’s turned down the job as director of the Czech National Ballet three times ‘because I was still young and wanted to dance’.”

“Choreographer Tere O’Connor flails his arms and gyrates an invisible Hula-Hoop, struggling to convey the idea of improvisation to members of the Beijing Modern Dance Co. The dancers, already grappling with the language barrier, simply mimic his moves – not the point, as he tells them in the new documentary Taste of Body.”

“If the idea of watching 40 mostly unathletic blokes trying to execute an arabesque or a leg extension with the slightest semblance of grace sounds funny, that’s because it is. As Guerin explains, … ‘You need to be prepared for laughs. … It’s not malicious, but people will find you – what you do – funny. You’ll find, though, that the untrained guys are always the stars of the show. Always.'”

Moze Mossanen’s Romeos and Juliets, an hour-long film to be broadcast on CBC, “follows the National Ballet of Canada as it prepared last fall for one of the biggest undertakings in its 60-year history, a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy of star-crossed lovers, choreographed by an acclaimed master of his craft, Russian-born Alexei Ratmansky.”

“I recently asked students at a course I was giving to help me define dance [and] the one we arrived at that stood out, especially in this context, was that dance is a vibration of the spirit, that stirs the body to move when music is being played. By that definition, it is not unreasonable to conclude that if the quantum universe is made of music then we are all dancing right now.”

Judith Mackrell: “Almost everything I’m due to see over the next two months, whether part of the official Cultural Olympiad or not, seems hellbent on breaking records for size or scale.”

“A short documentary goes behind the scenes at the New York City Ballet, where Marc Happel, the director of costumes, creates a new, Swarovski-encrusted look for the company’s signature ballet.”

“The monarchy flew [11 Native American dancers] over for two weeks in May, but the dream trip turned a bit nightmarish when they checked out the program that billed their act as ‘Cowboys and Injuns.’ They would perform after a specialty rodeo act, with cowgirls doing roping stunts, and dance to canned, cliché Indian music plucked from old Western movies.”

Andile Ndlovu, of the Washington Ballet: “I am really fortunate to have bigger hands to help stabilize my partner. I always think about what the correct leverage is going to be. Developing the wisdom to apply the right leverage in the right place at the right time is what training and even life is about.”

Television embraces classical dance, from dramedies to flat-out dramas (“The Black Swan effect”) to reality shows. Why? “The area is ripe for exploration. … The ballet world is also filled with hierarchies, rivalries, romance and heartbreak, which mirror the fictional story lines of scripted dramas.”