Category: dance

“Tuesday’s inaugural performance of the new White House Dance Series transformed the stately room into a stage for some of the world’s most talented dancers to strut their stuff: Endless pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and some crazy one-handed spinning handstands, too.”

“The Carreño Dance Festival, named for ballet dancer José Manuel Carreño, will have two components: master classes and two performances by several guest artists in December, and a monthlong dance workshop next August, which will culminate in four performances.”

When the South Indian dancer Vijayalakshmi decided to adapt one of Western classical ballet’s totems to the Mohiniyattam style – using Tchaikovsky’s score – she raised some eyebrows among admirers of both disciplines.

“[She] has spent three years piecing together an unlikely alliance of science and art, brain and body, called The Matter of Origins. A meditation on physics and life, the dance-theater work was inspired by Lerman’s visit to the particle-accelerating Large Hadron Collider.”

“There will always be choreographers who care about steps, music and classical forms. But for many experimental artists, the word “dance” alone can’t begin to hold it all in. So what are we talking about when we talk about dance these days?”

In this piece, “Balanchine made a dance that would become the Rosetta Stone for a new kind of dancer, the American classical dancer. He brought a kind of democracy into the hierarchical land of ballet classicism, lifting it from its dusty 19th-century splendor, and created, simultaneously, an aristocracy for American dancers who had none.”

“The point is to honor and educate. … We’re honoring Judith Jamison, who has been a leader for decades. We are bringing in students from around the country to give them a day in the White House and share with them some of the great performers.”

“The casually lettered sign on the sidewalk in front of Dance Theater Workshop says ‘Live Drawing Tonight 5-9 p.m’.” Inside, visual and movement artist Tony Orrico, an alumnus of Trisha Brown’s and Shen Wei’s companies, is spending four-hour stretches drawing on DTW’s gallery wall as an audience looks on.

“Apprenticeships are relatively brief … and dancers must quickly adjust from the coddled life of a senior student (or, in the case of ABT II members, that of a soloist) to one in which attention is a precious and rarely bestowed commodity.”