Category: dance

“Almost overnight, Youth America Grand Prix created a central ballet marketplace, and just as suddenly it upped the ante even higher on ballet’s infamously demanding training regimen. Competitions, though controversial, do have their supporters. They argue that contests give American students valuable performing experience, which they generally lack in comparison to their European counterparts.”

The Philadelphia company Rennie Harris Puremovement brings its moves to Israel and the West Bank.

“The Pennsylvania Ballet will no longer be the country’s only major ballet company without its own school, the latest pirouette in its remarkable turnaround from the brink of insolvency two decades ago.”

“There was this hype of me coming, and this attention of people watching, and expectation. And sometimes I struggle with the thought that I am really not good enough to be in this position. … And it even boils down to these simple steps that I have been doing my whole career. I am doing them so differently now and I am questioning them so differently. … Sometimes I even question: Am I losing who I am? Am I losing what made me as a dancer?”

“With the migration of more and more working choreographers into university environments, it’s clear that artists are able to continue to create both inside and outside of these institutions. While the halls of academia offer some distinct advantages, most particularly to oft-itinerant and nearly always-struggling dance artists, other challenges and demands can sap their time and energy in their new environment.”

“Well, shoes are very important to dancers – pointe shoes, ballet slippers, Broadway dance shoes, tap shoes. So it was an opportunity for dance – loads and loads, of all varieties – when Capezio celebrated its 125th anniversary Monday evening with a gala at New York City Center.”

“Stephen Bimson, 29, who graduated from the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in 2009, is working with a granddaughter of a Cambodian princess to transform a one-bedroom flat into Cambodia’s first ballet studio.”

“It’s a very different life than she could have imagined when she was 4½-year-old Mabinty Bangura, living in an orphanage in violent, impoverished Sierra Leone. Young Mabinty had only one friend and was anything but a favorite with the ‘aunties’ who ran the orphanage, perhaps because she had vitiligo, a pigmentation condition that left white patches on her upper chest. One day, she found a magazine that had blown against the orphanage gate. In it was a picture of a ballerina in pointe shoes. She tore it out and kept it, and dreamed of dancing like that one day.”