Category: dance

Edmond Kilpatrick on his new work, Party Boys: “I was working on a humorous piece, but the day after the riot, it somehow didn’t seem funny any more. I kept thinking about what had just happened, and ended up taking the original construct I had built and reimagining it as a response.”

Colleagues in the dance world tell him that series like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance?” exposes dance – an imperiled art form especially in a recession – to the masses. Said Jones: “That’s good for dance, people say. But it’s not good that dance is sport. It is not sport. It is a subtle art form.”

“A true depiction of today’s artistic director would be that of a multi-tasking, over-worked and driven man or woman, often imprisoned in tedious meetings when they yearn to be in the studio, always juggling dozens of demands and sudden emergencies.”

“An original ballet staged in a haunted Queenslander beat out acclaimed works from Victoria and Europe to claim the 2011 Helpmann Award for best dance work, presented in a glittering ceremony at the Sydney Opera House last night.”

Peter Lovatt, head of the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, talks about findings that dance can improve divergent thinking (in trying to solve complex problems) and can improve the condition of Parkinson’s disease patients. (He also found that girls studying classical ballet have lower self-esteem.)

“It’s time to reclaim the word ballerina. It’s thrown carelessly at any young woman who has pulled on a pair of pointe shoes; even at toddlers with their first tiny tutus. It leaves nothing to describe, instantly, a woman at the height of her powers.”

“Ballet B.C. has announced it has reached its goal of raising $300,000 in its spring fundraising campaign, which ran between January and June. Meeting the target is integral to the company’s plan to gradually rebuild itself and create a new stability after facing a financial crisis that almost destroyed it in late 2008.”

“Attendance for the two-week season, which ran from July 5 to 16, is projected to be 36,800, up 7 percent from last year; ticket sales for 2011 are projected to be $936,000, up eight percent.”

“It was a slow climb for Villella, who was hard-pressed to lure top dancers trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet [in New York] … ‘We were the fourth, fifth choice,’ Villella said of his rank in the American ballet world’s pecking order. ‘We were unproven’.”