Category: dance

“In the first collaboration between Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican, the works” – “an unprecedented season of 10 back-to-back works created as she responded to cities and countries that she visited throughout her long career” – “will be staged in June and July 2012 as a highlight of the Cultural Olympiad. In the world of contemporary dance this is as big as it gets.”

The singer-songwriter visited the Alberta Ballet’s studios to check out Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the work that company director Jean Grand-Maître is creating to her songs. “I was trying to hold back my tears,” she said afterward, “it was just so emotional.”

Modeled after Gelabert’s “Son Amar” dinner-theater show in Majorca, Spain, and housed in a former Toys R Us building that cost $20 million to buy and renovate, Battle of the Dance represents the latest in an increasing number of live dance events, tours and competitions that have sought to capitalize on the art form’s arrival into the zeitgeist.

People would ask me to help them with a role when I stopped dancing. They’d commission me to do that. Teaching has to do with the basics of class and technique. I’m much more interested in helping a ‘finished’ dancer when they’re looking at a role … it’s like finding your voice.

“The Paris Opera Ballet will make its long overdue Chicago debut during a one-week engagement in the summer of 2012 at the Harris Theater. The outing, to feature the full 154-member troupe, will be the first stop on a North American tour, marking the company’s first U.S. performances in more than a decade.”

“Started in Jamaica in the early ’90s by a street dancer with a broken leg, brukup flourished in Brooklyn’s space-deprived housing projects and had a flirtation with pop culture in 1997 … Instead of fading into obscurity like so many other urban dance crazes (remember the Worm?), it evolved, thanks in part to YouTube videos.”

Even as Christopher Wheeldon’s just-premiered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Britain’s Royal Ballet has drawn the ballet world’s attention, choreographer Shawn Hounsell has been preparing his own version, titled Wonderland, for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

“Workshops and master classes, training programs for budding dancers and a mid-season venue change for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre next year are all products of a multiyear partnership between the ballet company and the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.”

“American Ballet Theater is no stranger to The Firebird: the troupe already has in its repertory several versions of the ballet set to Stravinsky’s 1910 score. But none of those were by its artist in residence, Alexei Ratmansky.”

“When Lucinda Childs premiered Dance in 1979, audience members would walk out shocked and even offended by the choreographer’s minimalist, repetitive approach to movement.” But now, the 70-year-old choreographer’s “seminal work, revived in 2009 for a festival at Bard College, has been touring the United States and Europe.”