Category: dance

“Craig Hassall, managing director of English National Ballet, is to leave the company at the beginning of next year. Hassall is to take up the new role of chief operating officer at [impresario] Raymond Gubbay Limited in February 2012.”

The up-and-coming Royal Ballet star’s career has depended on fortunate happenstance: the dust in his childhood gymnastics club, being Ukrainian in St. Petersburg, and his ballet teacher’s dog.

Jack Widdowson, a 19-year-old apprentice at Bern:Ballett, was beaten and robbed after a night out while visiting his brother in Cardiff. His neck is apparently broken, and doctors fear that he may never dance again.

“I’m not dancing in white tights, after all. I’m dancing in street shoes and in jeans sometimes. It’s called dance, too. There are all kinds of movement – look at artists in tango or flamenco or butoh or hula. People dance at any age’.”

“Colin Peasley danced in the Australian Ballet’s first staging of The Merry Widow in 1975 and has been in at least 10 productions of it since.” The 77-year-old, who has served AB as principal dancer, ballet master and education director, “says that after 49 years in the country’s premiere ballet company, of which he was a founding member in 1962, he will finish next year.”

“[Stephen] Petronio’s dances may be as brash and dark as Brown’s are soft and sunny; [Vicky] Shick may take her cues from persona and behaviour as much as from the gravity and momentum that inform Brown’s aesthetic – but Brown’s working method has influenced them deeply.”

“What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers’ training, choreographers’ creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance world’s leading figures was brought together by theartsdesk for a major debate last Friday in central London.”

Nina Ananiashvili just can’t give up. Why? Because she changed the world for Georgian dancers. “She found deplorable conditions, no electricity, few supplies — and no pay for the dancers. She told them salaries would come — eventually — if they stuck with her.”

The first American to be named a principal dancer at the Bolshoi says he’ll never be a Bolshoi dancer, but he’s ready to meet the weight of expectations. First, he might have to learn to stop smiling so much.

“‘His older brother would be renting The Transformers, and David would be asking for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,’ says [mother] Colleen Hallberg. ‘We didn’t know where that came from. Not from us’.”