Category: dance

“The Royal Danish Ballet – under the artistic direction of former New York City Ballet principal dancer Nikolaj Hübbe – announced Tuesday that it will perform in New York from June 14 to 19 as part of its four-week American tour.”

“Monday’s fire ravaged part of Samba City, a six-year-old complex of workshops and warehouses in Rio that serves as the preparation ground for the city’s [Carnival] parades [next month] … Three samba schools – out of the 12 using the facility – saw most of their stocks of costumes and floats and props wiped out by the flames.”

“I am not a performing animal and I won’t soon do this again. But I like to know I can, in the right piece and the right setting, which this program is because all of these pieces are very personal statements.”

“In dance, I think primarily because the art form is ephemeral by nature, critics clutch at abstract imagery, hoping that the readers are entertained or keeping up. Dance is a difficult art form to pin down: all the more reason not to stray too far.”

New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns, who’s currently dancing Odette/Odile with the company, answers such questions as “Can dancing Swan Lake make a dancer go completely mental?” and “Can the ballet’s final scene, as in the film, be danced with a shard of glass lodged in one’s torso?”

The “Big Ballet,” a company created by choreographer Evgeny Panfilov to show that heavy women can dance with grace and technical skill, has had to lower its minimum weight requirement from 108 kg (238 lbs) to 95 kg (210 lbs) in order to hire enough ballerinas for its upcoming UK tour. (The producers blame fitness campaigns in the media.)

The filmmaker Carlos Saura, known for his flamenco-based cinematic retellings of Blood Wedding, Carmen and El Amor Brujo, is doing a rare turn as a stage director with a two-hour show that aims to narrate the evolution of the dance genre.

Critics at the New York Times sample seats high up in the city’s four major dance venues.

“In a new twist on creative collaboration, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), maker of Reyataz, a drug used in combination therapy to treat HIV, is partnering with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). BMS is, at this point, the major donor for the development of a new work inspired by photos and essays created by or about people living with HIV.”

“Julie Diana, a journalist and principal dancer for Pennsylvania Ballet, discusses how costumes shape a dancer’s body, movement and attitude.”