Category: dance

“Twenty-seven years after Les Grands Ballets Canadiens first performed in China, the company is setting off with 50 dancers and crew this month for Beijing and two other Chinese cities, Dalian and Guangzhou. The intervening years have seen radical changes in both China and the company. It’s likely that neither will recognize the other.”

“How does an artist reconcile his dream with reality? For Beirut’s Caracalla Dance Theatre, survival in the Arab world depends on a careful balance of imagination and financial pragmatism. Love and money perform a delicate duet.”

“The most significant effort is the Resident Commissioned Artist Program: Each year, one mid-career artist will be given the rare package of a salary, health benefits, a two-year residency and a commission.”

“An internal report on the Royal Danish Ballet leaked to the press last week alleges that a culture of cocaine abuse, stemming from the artistic director down to the ballet corps, pervades the prestigious company.”

“Barely heard of in the mainstream, freestyle has been left to flourish into its own surreal and awe-inspiring discipline. … Covered in spray tan and makeup, these young dancers are wearing costumes ostentatious enough to make Lady Gaga feel dowdy.”

Dancers Carlos Acosta and Zenaida Yanowsky joined BBC Breakfast to talk about it.

Revisiting the late choreographer’s works, from Le jeune homme et la mort, Carmen and The Little Mermaid to his 1972 Pink Floyd ballet.

“The main factor that holds Ballet Theater back from the true greatness it sometimes approaches isn’t dancers but repertory. How seriously can you take a company that starts its “Swan Lake” — season after season, complacently — with a prologue that ends with the sorcerer von Rothbart tenderly abusing an imitation swan? “

“I have to ask how I can make dance in New Zealand better, how I can develop a signature style for the company … It can’t just be about my own ideas. … I want to be able to find choreographers and designers of a level that can be developed, so a long-term ballet culture can be created here.”

“On the date of a threatened lockout of the Joffrey Ballet’s dancers by company management, in an ongoing dispute over contract negotiations, it appears as if a gallery of current company members has been deactivated on the Joffrey’s website.”