Category: dance

In a major initiative for his first season as artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Robert Battle is creating “the New Directions Choreography Lab, which will grant $9,500 resident fellowships to four emerging or midcareer artists each year.”

Gideon Obarzanek’s Connected, created for his company, Chunky Move, “is a dance piece about art itself – viewed from shifting perspectives … Operated with strings attached to [the dancers’] bodies, [Reuben Margolin’s] undulating sculpture moves in sync with the dancers.”

“Ballet needs boys like the National Hockey League needs the peace-loving Amish. Ballet needs boys like biblical scholarship needs women.”

“Dance companies across the country are losing income and staff, getting smaller audiences and seeing donations fall sharply. The problems are combining to endanger their futures.”

“The real interest is working out what drives dancers, most of whom train every day, building speed and intricate routines, to excel in a sport where there’s no prize money and very little attention outside an almost entirely closed community. Add to that the fact that they wear costumes which make them look something like oversized dolls.”

“That the dancers should perform exercises based on Merce Cunningham technique to a hypnotic rhythm developed by West African slaves typifies the blend of cultures and disciplines that is the hallmark of [the company].”

“[But] that’s what it is. Theatrical elements and thematic structures are built around movement that is charismatic and complex, but not excessive. … Because my works are socially disturbing and perceived as being deliberately provocative, these aspects have been interpreted as dangerous physicality.”

At 28, she is not only a soloist at American Ballet Theatre–the first black woman in decades–but she also has a good shot at becoming its first African-American principal female dancer. “It’s not like she’s going, ‘Hey, look at me,’ ” says frequent partner Craig Salstein. “But she can be so ethereal, you just have to.”

“Robert Battle is still artistic director ‘designate’ of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater — he officially takes the steering wheel from outgoing director Judith Jamison on July 1. Although his appointment was announced last year, he says 12 months of preparation have barely been enough to learn to drive the Ailey showboat.”

The two stars of choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s new version of the Brecht-Weill piece talk about creating the piece; Kent explains why Balanchine’s 1958 version, in which she starred, is unrecoverable.