Category: dance

“Two of The National Ballet of Canada’s principal dancers are leaving the company to pursue their dream of performing in England. Bridgett Zehr and Zdenek Konvalina, who danced the leads in last year’s Swan Lake, are joining London’s English National Ballet as principal dancers.”

Dance magazine editor Wendy Perron offers a reply to “to ballet-doomsday-sayer Jennifer Homans.”

From the latest Step-by-Step Guide: “[The] Dutch choreographer … has been called the Mondrian of ballet, the Versace of ballet, the Pinter of ballet and the Antonioni of ballet – but really, he is just the Hans van Manen of ballet, with a distinctive personal style that mixes formal austerity and glassy elegance with erotic charge.”

“Royal Ballet resident choreographer McGregor will direct the large-scale routine at the centre of the [2012 Big Dance] festival, which will become nationwide [that year] as part of the Cultural Olympiad.”

“Duato is the first foreign choreographer in a century to run a Russian ballet company–St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Ballet, now in its 178th season – and traditionalists are nervous. … Duato is facing the biggest artistic challenge of his career: dragging Russian ballet, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.”

“Only two years ago the company was nearly $1 million in debt. Now its budget is balanced, its repertoire rejuvenated and most of its performances at the Mertz Theater of the FSU Center for Performing Arts are sellouts. But ironically, it is that very success that has created new hurdles.”

“The up-and-coming wave of contemporary dancers has paid close attention to issues of identity as they seek to break away from definitions of dance set by icons such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. For them, contemporary dance is the only true universal language.”

Original cast member June Omura: “Mark knew the music so well that his choreography came out faster than most human beings could put up with. If you lost your concentration for a second, you were called out.” (Morris says only, “It was very difficult to make, both for me and my company.”)

“In 1979, video wasn’t as pervasive, so the effect of seeing the same dancers simultaneously on screen and on the stage was startling. In the contemporary version of Dance, a gap has opened between the live and virtual performers. ‘The dancers today, are very different from what they were,’ Childs explains. ‘They are much more technically trained, they also are different people’.”

“For nearly 20 years, [Britt Tajet-Foxell] has been the Royal Ballet’s resident psychologist, working alongside its physiotherapists, masseurs and body-control experts to unlock fears, inhibitions, phobias and fixations and lead dancers to realise their full potential.”