Category: dance

“The audience awaits, bearing 300 years of experience. In the halls of the Duma next door, things Western are cause for suspicion. As the house lights dim on opening night, the uphill course confronting the American Ballet Theatre grows ever more illuminated – the stage is at a slope.”

“The Royal Academy, which has set and marked hundreds of thousands of (mainly little girls’) ballet exams over 90 years, has spotted a sharp drop in exam registrations. In the last two years, across the UK, these have fallen by 11.5% – from 63,996 to 56,661.”

“The cleanly designed site lets you sort performances by era, genre and artist. The clips start in 1937 with a startlingly clear view of Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers (he founded the festival four years earlier) and run through 2010, when the lineup included Bill T. Jones’s company, the State Ballet of Georgia and Shantala Shivalingappa.”

“I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.”

“[What] could be more oddly contrarian in this rapidly digitizing time than launching a newspaper? How about this? Launching a newspaper devoted to the discussion of ‘contemporary dance practice and theory’.”

Sarah Lane “said via email a few minutes ago that she earned ‘$4000 per week before taxes so after taxes it was about $2000 plus a little overtime.’ She worked on the film for six weeks and two days.” Black Swan has so far earned more than $281 million worldwide.

“Why have Ailey and Taylor survived and prospered, while so many others have withered? Continuity happens because of generations of ardent believers in a dance artist’s work.”

“Your old-fashioned hard-nosed football junkies would say dancing is soft, but there are a lot of benefits that athletes could gain from dancing. Your more explosive athletes are usually your athletes with the higher levels of flexibility, agility and coordination. These are all qualities that can be gained from dancing.”

“Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie… I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff.”

“We were fortunate to have Sarah there to cover the more complicated dance sequences and we have nothing but praise for the hard work she did. However, Natalie herself did most of the dancing featured in the final film.”