Category: dance

“Now in their early forties, [Michael] Nunn and [William] Trevitt are passing their experience on to the fledgling dancers who make up their cheekily named new troupe, The Talent.”

He was deeply honored to have the job of running and revitalizing the Bolshoi Ballet, but the company’s ferocious internal politics wore him out and dangerous, mistrustful Moscow boxed him in. At ABT, he has the freedom to mold dancers his way, to accept outside work, and to not be tied up running a company.

“It’s crazy,” says the 41-year-old director. “Black Swan doesn’t feel much different from my past films, so I don’t get it. The movie is out there, it’s definitely weird. The first comments we got back from people were that it was weird.”

“I knew [the piece] was going to be about a difficult thing, orations, but it would also be about ideas, about the passage of time, about the abyss – being on the verge of a [civil] war. How do you take ideas like this and give the dancers something to do?”

“‘Getting Bronte’s characters onto the stage proved to be very difficult,’ Deborah Dunn says. ‘From specific people, they dissolved into generalized gothic archetypes. I just couldn’t get across the story. I was resorting to pantomime, and those scenes had to go’.”

“With flare and unique style, Cuban dancers are climbing to stardom in American companies from American Ballet Theatre in New York to the Boston and the San Francisco Ballets, and are widely considered the new Russians of ballet.”

“I want to teach the [Russian] dancers to enjoy modern dance, to move their bodies in a different way, to touch each other in a different way, to be more contemporary like people in the streets.”

Lerman’s pioneering work in including elderly dancers in her troupe and in making site-specific dances in shipyards and other communities earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2002.

“It can only be put down to the right combination of personalities with the right music. That’s why sometimes you make a bad ballet. Because something’s not right. You’re not inspired by the dancers, or you think the music is going to move you in a certain way, and then it doesn’t.”

“As the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has proved with its well-chronicled series of injuries, artists attempting to defy gravity face a panoply of potential hazards. Genuine physical jeopardy is intrinsic to aerial performance in theater, in circus, in dance, and even on pop-music tours — and that only makes it more appealing to audiences.”