Category: dance

In four decades together, the Japanese-American dance artists have only created works for themselves to perform. Except, that is, for two pieces that have grown out of workshops in Phnom Penh in which they taught students “what they call their ‘Delicious Movement,’ a discipline meant to foster kinetic sensitivity.”

“When I came to ballet in the 1970s, I caught the end of a golden age of ballet musicality. Our era is not golden in that way. Yet the winter season at New York City Ballet, which ended on Sunday, brought more than a few moments when music mattered again.”

Royal Ballet director Monica Mason talks about putting together the creative team – choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, composer Joby Talbot, scenarist Nicholas Wright, star Lauren Cuthbertson – for the company’s first full-length commissioned ballet in 15 years.

“It’s quite terrifying, actually. Telling a story is where the challenge has lain for me. But I have always wondered what I can and can’t do as a choreographer. So I took this on partly out of curiosity.”

Former Balanchine star Toni Bentley: “[It] isn’t a film about real ballerinas at all, no more than Jurassic Park is a film about real scientists (or real dinosaurs for that matter) – it merely exploits the locale, the props, and the outerwear. … Aronofsky has created a movie celebrating the failure of a ballerina, and by implication her entire art – disguised, insidiously, as a film about sacrifice and success.”

“Every company has its dedicated supporters and fans, but across the board the field is struggling to broaden the appeal: Modern dance is going through an existential shift.”

“In ballet circles, a tantalizing question has generated much excitement and speculation: Is Black Swan the new Turning Point, the 1977 film that helped to popularize ballet and ushered in the high summer of “the dance boom” when Americans seemed to fall in love with dance? Could Black Swan ignite a second great love affair between Americans and classical ballet in the 21st century?”

In a joint statement, the unions said that they agreed to wage freezes last year “despite the fact that NYCB’s fiscal problems seem to be caused by questionable artistic and administrative planning, by a development department that isn’t raising enough money, and a publicity department that isn’t selling enough tickets.”

“The children from Cali’s poor communities have a very high level of development,” says Fabian Hoyos, a director of Circo para Todos and a circus performer in Delirio. “Our mission is to offer them a chance, and see if they want to take it.”

“It is a love story titled Ocean’s Kingdom and will have its premiere at the company’s fall gala on Sept. 22.” Peter Martins will choreograph the “‘romantic story’ involving two worlds: the ocean kingdom, representing purity, and the earth kingdom, inhabited by ‘the sort of baddies’.”