Category: dance

Four Alvin Ailey Dance Company members talk about everything from maturing into roles to intimate connections with fellow dancers, green juice and high-energy jumps.

One left a principal position at American Ballet Theatre; the other did the same at New York City Ballet – in order to found their own company. Where will Ballet Next take them?

“Bodies require constant upkeep and attention. Escaping injury is a combination of knowledge, care and luck. Our injury report is no less impressive than that of the Colts.”

“Paul Mejia’s Metropolitan Classical Ballet has vacated its premises in Arlington. … ‘They stopped paying their rent and we found the doors locked by the landlord’,” said the head of once dance center who shared teachers with MCB.

On top of all the usual difficulties of preserving an art form as ephemeral as dance, Ashton had a problematic attitude toward his artistic legacy: As he himself put it, “F*** posterity!” Tony Dyson, founder of the Ashton Trust talks about how he and his colleagues keep Ashton’s ballets alive on stage.

In a newly-published interview from 2008, the late choreographer chats about technology, iPods, choreographing with the I Ching, and financing early work with mushrooms.

“Modern dance is becoming an increasingly threatened medium, and it needs attentive, educated critics…”

“I get up in the morning and it’s like, I’m doing everything in the world that I’ve always wanted to do: I have 16 great dancers and four studios and I’m living in Sydney, a city that is beyond beautiful.” Judith Mackrell gets the choreographer, now artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, to tell how he got there.

“[In North America and in Europe] it’s more liberal. You can’t push the kids to work very hard. You can’t touch the kids, of course. You can’t scream. It’s hard to convince little children to work very hard and to go through pain. In Russia, it was like the army. It’s one of the reasons they produce very good dancers.”

“The Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis, which opened to great fanfare in September, is losing the executive director it hired just 10 months ago. In a surprise announcement Tuesday, the center said Frank Sonntag has resigned, effective at the end of the year.”