Category: dance

“[The] dancers’ paid weeks were cut from 35 to 33, this season, a reduction of 5.7 percent. Administrative employees, including [the executive director], are seeing a 5 percent decrease for the year. And … the company canceled all four June performances of Don Quixote … in Dallas.” (The Fort Worth dates will proceed as scheduled.)

Gus Solomons jr’s troupe Paradigm (“Dance legends in concert”) uses only performers 50 and older. But what dancers! The roster ranges from youngster Robert La Fosse to the still-fabulous 80-year-old Carmen deLavallade.

“Although Fox Searchlight, director Darren Aronofsky and actress Mila Kunis have all stepped forward to refute Lane’s claims that Natalie Portman only did five percent of the dancing in her Oscar-winning turn in “Black Swan,” Lane refuses to back down.”

“The Royal Opera House (ROH) is to stage the British premiere of a ballet by German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill that was lost in a library basement for 80 years. The ROH is showing Magical Night, or Zaubernacht, in December. The ballet tells the story of two children’s toys brought to life.”

“In Kenya’s giant Mathare slums poverty and crime are widespread. But youngsters there are getting a chance to realize their potential – by learning ballet.” The principal of a local school for poor children says that students in the ballet classes show greater engagement with and success in their schoolwork.

“The money, which will be worth more than £15,000, will be granted to a recipient to work on their choreographic skills over a period of 12 months. The New Adventures Choreographer Award has been created by colleagues and friends of Bourne to mark his [50th birthday] last year.”

Former Bolshoi star Andris Liepa and the Kremlin Ballet of Moscow have been using photographs, notes, paintings, set and costume designs, and other sources to reconstruct seven of Diaghilev’s most storied ballets, including L’Après-midi d’un faune, Firebird, Le Dieu bleu and Nijinska’s original Boléro. In addition to performances in the West (they open in London this week), Liepa and his company bring these works to provincial Russia, where they had never been seen.

“Kristen McNally … and five dancers from The Royal Ballet, worked on a dance to a Kanye West song, incorporating suggestions from the audience at the Apple Store in Covent Garden.”

“Although the Legacy Plan lays out terms for other companies to take on Cunningham’s dances (a few already have), I can’t imagine them being performed by others with anything like the style Cunningham instilled into several generations of his own performers.”

“Ballet fans, meet your guitar heroes. Pop musicians, unbound by the traditions that confine ballet as much as preserve it, are increasingly turning to the art form for inspiration and finding new ways to do what so many ballet companies yearn to do in their quest to keep audiences: plug it in to contemporary life. At least for three minutes.”