Category: dance

On a subject about which she is notoriously tight-lipped, she said, “My goodness gracious, do you think that once you plant a beautiful tree and help it grow for so many years that someone else will come along and just chop it down? Will someone take my place? Yes, we will keep going.”

“AileyCamp, a full-scholarship summer day camp with classes in dance technique for urban students, will come to Newark this summer. … The six-week program will be held at the Newark Arts High School, from July 5 to Aug. 12 for 100 [local] middle-school students.”

We tend to think there will always be a supply of spectacular Cuban men dancers. As Gia Kourlas says, they “seem to grown like weeds.” Well, a whole generation of weeds has been pulled up, and now the garden of male dancers has thinned out.

“The Australian Ballet has announced a six-performance tour to New York’s Lincoln Centre in June next year to add an international dimension to its golden jubilee.”

For the second year in a row, Clark is staging a work in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall using both professional and untrained dancers. One of last year’s performers writes about the experience.

Judith Mackrell: “I’m used to giving lectures on dance criticism or talking about my job to interested adults. But when I was asked to participate in a project involving primary school children from Years 4 and 6 I was in unknown terrain. When I was eight years old I didn’t even know what a dance critic was.”

“It comes along when it comes along. In the meantime you have to be in there, trying a bit of this and a bit of that, and staying with all those semi-moments, all those ho-hum kinda moments, trying something else and doing it over, and working, but also waiting. You have to keep yourself available, keep the work available, and work up to those whamo times, then with them, also after them, till the next, till the whole thing takes off, tells you it is.”

Therrell Camille Smith has been teaching at her own dance school in Northeast Washington, DC since 1948. Even today, she still “gives demonstrations, joining her students at the bar as they execute their plieés, rond de jambes and relevés.

“You wouldn’t recognise them, as they head for freezing upstairs rooms in tatty gymnasiums and slink into backstage theatre doors. You wouldn’t know their faces, even though they appear regularly in sold-out musicals and on the nation’s favourite television shows. They have no money, even though they perform with famous singers in international tours.”

“The State Department will provide financial and logistical support to Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s first set of performances in Russia … The performances will be presented June 14-16 by the International Chekhov Festival in Moscow.”