Category: dance

“Suraya Hilal is a giant in the world of Arabic dance, revered for reviving traditional dances of the region, particularly her homeland of Egypt, and transforming them into a contemporary form known as Hilal Dance.”

“The hair pins used to secure extravagant Irish dancing wigs may have led to a teenager’s hair loss, two Irish doctors have warned.”

New York City Ballet principal Charles Askegard takes his final bows with the company — but already has plans for his new venture, the aptly named Ballet Next.

“The company said on Wednesday that it would present a weeklong course on its training techniques in St. Petersburg, Russia, home of the Mariinsky Theater – the former Kirov – and a venerable part of ballet history.”

Before she choreographed the legendary 1976 staging of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Lucinda Childs was one more member of the now-historic, then-poor-and-struggling Judson Dance Theater. Childs, now 71, looks back at the long, strange journey she’s had ever since.

“How does one evoke and honor an iconic figure such as Nelson Mandela through dance? There would seem be plenty of risks.” But Garth Fagan has taken on the challenge, and “[the] resulting work, Madiba, will have its world premiere at the Joyce [next week].”

Seraph, the company’s piece for two dancers and robotic hovercraft, is more than just a high-tech lark. “Dodging the dancer, for example, is providing insights into how the quadrotors might best fly through forests when they are doing their day jobs. And the lights sported by the robots … are being adapted to give clues to human road users about a robot driver’s intentions in a project that might put a fleet of robot taxis on the streets of Singapore.”

“There are echoes of Billy Elliot in the way John Horton describes his move into ballet. Yet one major difference casts the fiction and fact wide apart; John’s journey to the stage started with a battle against severe drug addiction. He is one of several former addicts performing with Chester’s Fallen Angels Dance Theatre.”

The retiring New York City Ballet principal (and Mr. Candace Bushnell) talks about rehearsing with Jerome Robbins, his departure from American Ballet Theater, and his parents letting go study in San Francisco when he was 12.

Royal Ballet principal Sarah Lamb: “He studied ballet technique carefully. By the time you get to Degas’s later paintings and sketches, you can see that his studies paid off. Some of his sketches are annotated with the names of positions we still use today … [and] his depiction of them is very accurate.”