Category: dance

Over five years of collaboration, Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith have been “steadily honing their particular brand of comic, talky and vaudevillian dance-theater in which they subject their gay man-straight woman friendship, creative process and the tropes of contemporary dance to microscopic scrutiny.”

“Jane Austen this isn’t, although the plotline is worthy of a novel or a ballet movie — Black Swan, maybe, on overdrive.”

“What is modern dance today? Is ‘anything goes’ really an aesthetic? One of the last of the Greats, Merce Cunningham, has just passed from the scene, taking his dances with him. The last of the Great Modern Generation, Paul Taylor, still creates work that, at its best, is equal to his best, but he won’t be able to do this forever. Modern dance must wake up from its recycling sleep, digest, rethink, and move.”

“I think what I felt about the Broadway show was that it was ungroomed and needed pruning. Basically, I felt it rambled. I lightened the show. I took out some of the shadows in the underbrush. I made it more interior.” (Chris Jones: “And when Tharp references grooming and pruning, she speaks not of nips and tucks.”)

Fire poi dancing – the poi are “large, bulbous wicks attached to lengthy metal springs, resembling tennis balls on ropes. Flaming ones” – became popular at the Burning Man festival and is spreading through the US. In Brooklyn, there are lessons – clandestine, because of fire codes – on apartment building roofs.

“Lauri Stallings, has become a central catalyst for the Atlanta arts scene, continuing to pique Atlantans’ curiosity and create work that draws in an ever-widening circle of participants, collaborators, and spectators.”

The renowned and popular British dancer-choreographer has injured his Achilles tendon and has withdrawn from all performances at least through the end of February.

Alastair Macaulay: “Strangely, the difference between good and bad choreography counts for less at Ailey than at anywhere else. The lure is neither the individuals nor the material they perform so much as a more generalized feeling of large-spiritedness that the Ailey company always delivers. … Good or bad, taxing or simple, every work is accessible and appealing.”

Liam Scarlett, now 25, is making work for Miami City Ballet, the Ballet Boyz, and the Royal Ballet, where he is a company member. Already Scarlett is drawing comparisons to Christopher Wheeldon, whose career followed a similar trajectory.

St. Petersburg’s number two company has been grabbing headlines lately: luring two top Bolshoi stars away and bringing star modern choreographer Nacho Duato to strictly classicist Russia. Luke Jennings introduces the characters in the Mikhailovsky’s eventful story.