Category: dance

Dancer/choreographer/producer Nico Archambault “selected these 10 male dancers – who have fair-to-middlin’ dance training and charisma to burn – out of 120 who showed up to audition for his television show Ils Dansent, which … focuses on the intense training required to create a versatile male dancer.”

“There was no grand entrance, no curtain-up moment. Instead, dancers in white gradually emerged on the edges of Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza. Their movements foreshadowed doom: some falling, some with head in hands, some with arms outstretched to sky, but all lunging forward.”

“With the world’s attention on New Zealand as it plays host to the Rugby World Cup, a Maori group has given an indigenous dance a contemporary twist, creating the ‘flash haka’.”

Since the horrors of 9/11, “choreographers have responded with works that attempt to make sense of the senseless.”

“Pina’s contribution to modern dance is unique. I needed a medium that would interpret dance through her eyes, using her language, and the more I looked through the history of dance film, the bigger my problem became. There’s a whole dimension missing in conventional film: space.”

Frank L. Sonntag of the new Cowles Center in Minneapolis: [We’ll be] “raising dance to a level that’s been enjoyed by music and theater here for a very long time, providing a venue that is discipline-specific, and just wait until you see it. This is going to be one of the finest venues in the whole world for dance, with amenities that [dance] artists usually have to make do without.”

The choreographer Trisha Brown “has won this year’s Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, an award worth about $300,000 that was named after the silent film actresses. The trust that administers the award, given to artists for ‘groundbreaking impact in their chosen fields,’ said Ms. Brown had ‘transformed’ modern dance ‘with new vocabularies of movement’.”

Deborah Jowitt: “It’s not surprising that Merce Cunningham didn’t envision a future for his company without him. As an artist, he appeared to think in the present tense, to live in the moment. Like the philosopher Heraclitus, he clearly believed that you couldn’t step into the same stream twice.”

“We’re musical, we work in visual theater, but we make things more in the way a painter or sculptor does than a choreographer. We go for the image first, then we add props, costumes, lighting and finally music. What you see is a little like walking through a botanical garden.”

“But it turns out that kathak, the form of classical Indian dance Khan has so successfully fused with elements of western contemporary dance, originates from the north of India and isn’t particularly connected with Bangladesh after all. And that he himself admits to avoiding engaging with Bangladeshi culture in his work.”