Category: dance

“Dance cannot be dismissed as a free-spirited life path with no career trajectory or something that’s inevitably going to leave me waiting tables for the rest of my life.”

“Footage of Merce Cunningham’s choreography is everywhere on YouTube, but it’s much harder locating film of him dancing, and this 1964 snippet is a collector’s find. Capturing an extract from Septet (created in 1953), it counters all those memories of Merce’s late, Lear-like performances, when his 70-something body had become straitened and hobbled by arthritis.”

“Last November, actress Liang Danni filed a complaint in Beijing’s Xicheng District Court against the National Ballet of China on behalf of her 87-year-old father, claiming 550,000 yuan ($86,968) in compensation and demanding a public apology. The elder Liang wrote the script for the original, film version of The Red Detachment of Women, from which the iconic Cultural Revolution ballet was adapted.

“The programme follows Michael Lynch, former Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre in London & the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, as he works with Northern Ballet’s dancers and staff to discover what’s going wrong and how they can prevent the impending loss of dancers following a 15% cut in Arts Council funding.”

“Topless dancers at Parisian cabaret Crazy Horse are negotiating with management over pay after strike action caused the show to be cancelled twice. The dancers work six nights a week earning €2,000 a month.”

In the work they call Dance Marathon, performance troupe Bluemouth Inc. wanted “to draw parallels between the Great Depression and what was in 2008 a nascent economic downturn.” They found that audiences wanted to participate rather than merely watch – and they were startled as people’s competitive juices began flowing and the show morphed into a genuine dance endurance contest.

“What we do here has a social and economic impact,” Jeanguy Saintus says. “Now everyone is talking about tourism, about projecting a different image of Haiti overseas. This is what we’ve been doing for years. And yet all the money goes to people who are feeding children, to the [nongovernmental aid organizations], not to the arts or what we do.”

“Young Italian movement group Dewey Dell are dedicated to forging a new form of theatre integrating music, choreography and lighting, but are so depressed by the Italian economy they are saddened when considering the future.

“But increasingly, community outreach is just the tip of the iceberg, and artists and social justice organizations are finding mutual benefits to deeper and more prolonged partnerships. That deliberate choice of engagement, as opposed to outreach, seeks to erase some of the traditional hierarchies between dancers and community members.”

The Black Widows, a group based at a Belfast elder care facility, are made up of women aged 85 to 102. Their rehearsals and occasional community performances provide exercise to muscles – physical and emotional – “that may have lain dormant for some years.”