Category: dance

Ruben Martin Cintas, principal at San Francisco Ballet: “I see stress as excitement without the breath… So I try to help that by breathing deep. I find some time to meditate and get a bigger perspective on things. Everything must have a solution, right?”

Choreographing for actors who aren’t quite triple threats yet, Kathleen Marshall “uses chess pieces to help block scenes involving lots of characters. She tracks other details, like calculating when performers can catch their breath, since actors can’t dance at full tilt at the same time they’re supposed to belt out a solo.”

“There are about fifty dances that have a good chance of being licensed by other companies…. I’m trying to figure out how to encourage American companies to do their first dance and, more importantly, to get them to bring in their second dance…. “

“The Mark Morris Dance Group will make its first foray into China, performing in Guangzhou and Macao from May 25 to June 2, the company said on Thursday.”

“A national youth dance company is to be set up, in response to a review of cultural education in England.”

The art form is finally finding its footing “after years of lagging behind other theatrical arts in performance opportunities, funding, media coverage and audience. … Most remarkable of all, in a Chinese context, is that many of these companies are privately run, self-supporting, unregistered – and fiercely independent.”

La Compañía del Cuerpo de Indias is something like a dance equivalent of Venezuela’s Simon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra – a professional troupe drawn from El Colegio del Cuerpo, which “draws many of its students from Cartagena’s most impoverished districts. Many come from a shantytown called Nelson Mandela, home to many families displaced by years of violence that pulverised Colombia in the 1980s and 90s.”

Lloyd Newson’s Can We Talk About This?, for his company DV8, is “one of the most searching examinations of Islamic extremism to have hit any stage in the UK, and a production with the potential to make the blasphemy controversy that grew around Jerry Springer: The Opera … look like a mere hiccup of disapproval.”

“In a small workshop flanked by midrise apartment blocks, a no-frills sandwich café and a betting parlor, 12 shoemakers each transform satin, canvas, cardboard, burlap and leather into 40 pairs of pointe shoes each a day. Freed maintains its approximately 50% market share (the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pacific Northwest, Miami, New York City, Paris Opera and Royal ballet companies all use Freed shoes) by offering traditionally made shoes with an extremely high degree of customization — something other companies, such as Gaynor Minden, Grishko, Sansha and Capezio — simply can’t afford to do.”

“The [Australian Ballet’s] world premiere of Infinity tonight, featuring work by three of Australia’s most respected choreographers, Graeme Murphy, Stephen Page and Gideon Obarzanek, … gives us an opportunity to reflect on the idea of ‘Australian dance’. Does Australian dance have something recognisable in quality, style or form?”