Category: dance

“New Essential Works, which finances the development of new dances, was created by the Jerome Robbins Foundation in the fall of 2009 in response to the financial crisis. Allen Greenberg and Daniel Stern, a trustees at the foundation, and Christopher Pennington, its executive director, were concerned about the prospect of a lost period of choreography.”

“The film’s director, Darren Aronofsky, might have set out to make a thriller, but for the dance community, the chills come from the unsettling topics he laid bare: the blind pursuit of perfection, the anorexia and bulimia to achieve a fat-free swanlike figure, the sexual abuse of fragile ingénues.”

“While the company’s stars often perform elsewhere on their own, establishing an official spinoff is a departure for the company.” The new group, called New York City Ballet Moves, will tour smaller venues in the US and abroad and travel the summer festival circuit.

Lauren Cuthbertson: “Some of Nina’s character felt accurate. We’re all obsessive in how we approach a new role … But in the film it’s all so extreme.” Edward Watson: “[W]hile this film shows the drive ballet dancers have to become perfect, it makes what we do look so naff and laughable. … The one cliche they didn’t go for so much was the bitching.”

“The head of New York City Ballet, Peter Martins, was arrested on misdemeanor drunken-driving charges in the early hours of the New Year.”

“One of the most obvious results of creating this new entity will be that two of the contemporary dance world’s long-established organizations will, technically speaking, no longer exist. Many observers of the merger, even while acknowledging the positives of the plan, seemed particularly concerned that the legacy of the 45-year-old DTW would be lost.”

“The dances that Louis XIV and Voltaire and Pushkin cherished did not survive. We can smile at that now, because we know how ballet, phoenixlike, rose again from its ashes; how, protean, it changed its nature with each new era.”

“[Colin] Jones’s own photographs of life behind the scenes at the Royal Ballet, taken in the early Sixties,… reveal the glamour and elegance of the dancers as well as the grueling regimes they endured, whether at rehearsals and in dressing rooms or on stage.”

As an antidote to the massive meat market that is the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters winter conference in New York – and as a corrective to the event’s paucity of contemporary dance – a “lone 28-year-old dynamo” has launched the American Realness festival.

I didn’t grow tired of seeing “The Nutcracker” 37 times in 27 treatments. Why? Because its features change on every level.