Category: dance

“While the influence of butoh is unmistakable in” choreographer Ledoh’s work, “the label doesn’t quite stick. Borrowing a definition from film, he calls what he does ‘butoh vérité’. He wants to pierce the genre’s trappings – glacial speed, bodily distortions, and white body paint – and focus the attention on the reality underlying the external phenomena.”

Steven McRae and Robert Stephen are “fellow members of a rare fraternity; ballet dancers who can tap like demons.” They sharing the role of the Mad Hatter in Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Wheeldon choreographed the role with McRae’s tap skills in mind.

“We can’t know for sure what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the arrests Saturday of five people who were dancing in his memorial. According to reports, they were grooving in silence to protest an earlier court ruling banning dance within the Jefferson Memorial.”

“His steps have lasted for so many years because they are real craft. There’s no flash, there’s an academy behind them, a tradition that has been handed on, so that one step links with the next. They are about certain moral values.”

“Like so many great romantic moments in the arts, it begins with the tolling of a bell. The sound dies. Hushed anticipation. Finally, the soldier makes his entrance – no ordinary recruit, but the relief commander of the 3rd U.S. Infantry, taking part in the changing of the guard ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.”

Alastair Macaulay: “This year some of us, but too few, have watched direct transmissions from the Royal Ballet in London, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. … Is it because these broadcasts happen sporadically, at various times of day and the week, that [venues have] not been packed? … We don’t see the Bolshoi enough that we can afford to skip these sightings.”

Even performers who heartily approve of stage nudity find the experience daunting when they actually have to do it. (Everyone’s afraid of wobbling.) Several veterans tell The Guardian about how they’ve handled the experience. (“Make sure you have a good lighting designer. It can make all the difference.”)

“Out with the old, in with the new. Whatever and whoever is responsible, the audience is responding with more genuine enthusiasm than it has in a long time. And lifelong City Ballet lovers like myself can turn up at the theater without flinching at the prospect before us.”

“I’m not interested in doing the branded, tick-all-the-right-boxes films for the existing audience (who’ve probably already bought their tickets). Those people will only fill 10 to 20 percent of the capacity, if that! We have to find, target and engage a new, inexperienced crowd, who will form very different opinions to what we’re used to. That gets me excited.”

“What is notable is how easily Cuban dancers, curious for a taste of ballet beyond the classics, find work in North American and European companies. … What is it about Cuban schooling that makes its dancers malleable enough to assimilate into so many companies far from home?”