Category: dance

“Music and dance operate in thrilling proximity; the visual sensuousness is in many ways exceptional; the levels of technical achievement and stylistic polish are high. … Though I saw much beautiful work in rehearsal, much of it is vitiated by the practices that surround live performance, especially at the festivals.”

“The 43-year-old has a rare gift for limning the quirks and verities of human behaviour through classical steps and it has catapulted him to the world stage.”

Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has a job on his hands with the American Ballet Theatre’s reimagining of Firebird. “More than a few choreographers have been burned by the score, but Ratmansky has a firm grip on Slavic storytelling using classical ballet vocabulary toward dramatic means. At his best, he summons music, emotion and technique to create illustrious images onstage.”

Myriam Simon: “As a teenager, I moved to a new neighbourhood and just walked into the nearby ballet school (as I understood later, it was the École Supérieure de Danse du Quebec!), without knowing anything about it. It was love at first sight: I auditioned for classes before I had even seen a ballet on stage, I had no idea – but they accepted me! When I took the very first steps in a ballet studio then, I knew: This was going to be my life.”

Once upon a time, “virtually every neighborhood had a dance hall, and white-tablecloth restaurants had dance floors. Collectively, they constituted a network of big-band music invisibly stitched together by the magic of radio, which was coming into its own.”

Arlene Croce: “Astaire and the difference he made to the film musical add up to more than the story of one career. No other film genre provided as perfect a synchronization of sight and sound or an experience as exhilarating, and that was very largely Astaire’s doing.”

“[On] Friday, the Royal Ballet are taking the concept of fly-on-the-wall to a new level: live-streaming an entire working day online, unedited and in real time.”

“When I went to the Bolshoi ballet company in Moscow recently, a lot of the dancers there had learned one of my pieces from YouTube: they were really inspired by being able to see something that they had no access to in their own country. I’ve also just made a little five-minute piece for young people for the Big Dance festival. Over 300,000 young people from all over the country are learning it through the internet.”

Not badly at all, thanks. “When you dance at the Bolshoi Theatre you really feel the weight of history, and the audiences are very appreciative and knowledgeable because ballet is just in their blood.”

Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project “is constructed in five parts, each of which explores the devastating outcomes of intolerance and discrimination, as revealed through the story of a Holocaust survivor.”