Category: dance

Director Darren Aronofsky “may offer all the usual accessories to the tale – vengeful ageing divas intent on thwarting the bright young thing headed to her doom, tyrannical directors, ambitious mothers, vicious colleagues, absurdly high stakes – but he forgets to like ballet.”

“Mine is fully classical; it’s more classical structurally and compositionally than a lot of classical ballets. I love a good Nutcracker that I didn’t make up better than anyone else, I love this stuff. It’s not a sendup. It’s a perfectly legitimate version with virtuosic dancing, and of course there’s funny stuff, and scary stuff and sexy stuff and, it’s sad.”

“Few pursuits demand the physical and mental commitment of ballet. But does that explain why so many movie ballerinas are mentally unstable?”

“New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay recently reviewed ‘George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker’ and he took a jab at one of the ballerina’s weight — and she’d previously left the ballet due to struggles with her body image.”

“Members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform Revelations nearly as often as ordinary people brush their teeth.” Judith Jamison and some of the company dancers talk about the piece, movement by movement, and what makes it great.

“She began by stripping dance of everything she could, just to see what was left. First to go were music and story. … Out of the window, too, went codified dance styles (too much theatrical baggage) and, indeed, theatres (ditto). The question then was, having thrown out all this bath water, what to do with the baby she was left holding?”

“Disembodied arms, legs, torsos, and heads-often filmed in close-up-make Black Swan perhaps not a great dance movie, but a visually powerful tour-de-force.”

Robert Battle, incoming artistic director of the Alvin Ailey company: “Anything I ever learned, I wanted to teach. When I learned martial arts, I would get my friends together and convince them they needed to learn martial arts. When I started to learn dance, same thing. … There was always this sense of wanting to lead.”

“In a partnership with French movie theatre giant Gaumont-Pathé, high-definition cameras will capture the performances for audiences in 12 countries, including Canada, the U.S., Italy, Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Germany and France.”

Officials at this year’s Havana International Ballet Festival have announced that they hope to host the Joffrey Ballet at the next festival, in 2012. Says Joffrey director Ashley Wheater, “I very much want us to go … and I also think it would be very important for Cuba’s dancers to see the work of the current generation of choreographers.” The problem, of course, is raising the money.