Category: dance

Ballet master Stuart Cook spends a few hours with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and changes their understanding of Jerome Robbins.

“[O]rdinary people lining up for tickets … saw most of the tickets snapped up by scalpers who had hired the homeless and the down-and-out to wait in line from the early morning hours to get the tickets.” Bolshoi general director Anatloy Iksanov says there’s no legal way to fight the problem.

“The English National Ballet is to take up residency at Tate Britain next February, to mark the opening of a new Picasso exhibition. Inspired by the artist’s costume and set design work with the Ballets Russes in 1919, the collaboration will see dancers take classes in the gallery. They will also rehearse and perform three new works inspired by the Picasso and Modern British Art exhibition.”

“Sadler’s Wells, the London dance theatre, has reported a strong year of ticket sales, but warns that financial pressures make it unlikely that some of the more experimental dance pieces for which it is famous will continue to be staged.”

“I still get amazed when people don’t realise that these pieces are part of a rep, that we’re a proper dance company, we do class every day. They think it’s like a show, with no continuity.”

Joan Acocella: “[In] my experience, all teen dance movies have serious messages. About the social hierarchy, for one thing.” And gender equality, too, and especially courage and perseverance. “But most of [that] is subtext, or pretext. The text is dance itself.”

The 34-year-old principal dancer “has retired and plans to focus on his choreography, the company announced on Wednesday.”

“After an all-male Swan Lake and the high-camp kitsch of his Nutcracker!, the choreographer Matthew Bourne is to complete his Tchaikovsky trilogy with a new version of one of the grandest ballets of them all – a modern-day Sleeping Beauty.”

“One thing you won’t see in Darshan Singh Bhuller’s ballet about Caravaggio is the act of painting. ‘One afternoon during rehearsals we tried to recreate the act of painting on stage,’ he tells me. ‘We all fell about laughing’.”

Donald Byrd: “He would always ask you to do impossible things. And you felt compelled to try to do it. … People would figure out how to do it, or some facsimile of it. And it was still extraordinary, even if it wasn’t what it originally was supposed to be.” Memories from Byrd, Patricia Lent, and Cunningham’s nephew Michael.