Category: dance

“[He] said he had decided to withdraw so that he could focus on his duties as dean of dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. This is Mr. Stiefel’s final year as dean. He is to take on the role of artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet in September.”

“Should we call this the globalization of ballet? On paper, this spectrum of backgrounds looks too hybrid to make any one company style possible. In performance, though, there’s still a multifaceted Royal Ballet style.”

“In a strategically promising trans-Atlantic co-production deal, National Ballet artistic director Karen Kain, who portrayed the aged Alice Liddell in [Glen] Tetley’s [1986 Alice], has invested – cost undeclared – in [the] spectacular new British production” that played at the Royal Ballet last month.

“Juan Escalante, executive director at Orlando Ballet, has resigned after leading the ballet for nearly two years.” He gave no explanation for his departure other than “pursuing new career opportunities.”

“She knew that there was an invisible wall between the stage and the screen. Yet she trusted that I would find a way to overcome that. … And looking at all her filmed stuff and other dance movies, I realised I couldn’t do better.” Then, after seeing a U2 concert film in 3D, “I visited her, and told her about 3D and I said that that this was what we’d been missing. That was the invisible wall.”

A pair of former Trisha Brown Dance Company members “are taking notes on Brown’s works, in charge of an archive whose initial five-year plan was recently put in motion. However, unlike equally iconic American dance figures such as Balanchine, Cunningham and Graham, there’s no capital-T technique following Trisha Brown’s last name.”

“Some years ago this repetitive, mesmerizing but severe work was big in France, welcome territory for other cerebral experimentalists such as Merce Cunningham … but here? And yet Childs has been touring the country with Dance for two years, with dancers who weren’t even born when the work premiered.”

“If the ballet vocabulary created restrictions, then scenery, costumes and props provided their own physical limitations – and this is where the new story ballets arriving on our stages are shaking things up. … While technology frees up the story ballet to go wherever it wants, it also has the potential to liberate choreographers from relying simply on body language.”

“It’s something I would love to do in the future but it’s an enormous commitment and it’s not just a creative commitment. It’s an enormous managerial commitment. … [At] this point in my career, it’s a bit too early to take on the pressures of managing [more than 100] dancers.”