Category: dance

“Ukrainian-born Sergei Polunin, 22, has had his work permit revoked following his surprise walkout last week.” The Royal Ballet “is legally required to alert the UK Border Agency as soon as any of its foreign dancers resign.”

Joshua Beamish, now 24, founded his own company at age 17; the troupe has since performed in Toronto, Montreal and New York and represented Canada at the Shanghai World Expo. Yet Beamish says he has received only minimal funding from the BC Arts Council because it doesn’t see him as having a sufficient track record.

“It’s a confusing time at the moment, I have made a big decision and the next one will be important so I don’t want to rush it. … I need a few days alone to think about what I’m doing as I haven’t decided yet.”

“Jennie Somogyi, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, tore the Achilles’ tendon in her right foot during a performance Saturday night and will be out for the rest of the season, the company said on Monday.”

When a children’s dance company in northern Virginia did a skit called “Little Rabbit, Where’s Your Mammy?,” Jackie Carter, angered by the hoary old stereotype, began to boo. She returned the next evening, passed out fliers and made enough noise to disrupt the performance – whereupon she was arrested for disorderly conduct, a charge which carries up to one year in prison.

“Every classic dance film ever made would have infinitely more power with real dimensional space around, behind, above and in front of the dancers. Think about Fred Astaire gunning down the corps in ‘Top Hat’ or the fantastic colors and shapes in ‘The Red Shoes’ ballet or Baryshnikov defining male classicism for the whole century in ‘The Turning Point.'”

“I once asked Alvin Ailey about a particularly unfortunate video shoot and he shrugged, saying that directors who can get the financing for dance projects aren’t always the ones who can do right by the artists involved.”

In an interview she conducted last month, Judith Mackrell notes that Polunin “spoke almost angrily of the kid he might have been had he not been pressured into ballet by family duty – the kid who could have gone to football matches, knocked around the streets with his mates and got into trouble.”

“New York 1967: The Joffrey Ballet does the unthinkable, turning rock music, war and revolt into a new template for ballet. Ballet! … Robert Joffrey [was] making a work called Astarte, with a rock band in the orchestra pit and space-age goddesses grooving in psychedelic unitards.”

“Since taking the reins in 1995, Sharon Gersten Luckman racked up a list of accomplishments that have made the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater one of the city’s most solid, well-managed modern dance companies.”