Category: dance

“Sion Irwin-Childs could write the book on multi-tasking. With an ambition verging on audacity he’s set out to fill a hole in Toronto’s summer dance calendar by producing a new festival called Dance 2 Danse. … ‘I’m an army of one,’ he says. ‘It’s the way I like it’.”

“The six performers climbed down ropes, and the rhythmic music blasted from speakers. While dangling sideways, several hundred feet in the air, they danced. They leaped across the skyscraper. They bounced off the glass, their arms and legs stretched out, almost doing jumping jacks in the air.”

Currently in the U.S. only four women direct ballet companies with budgets of more than $2.5 million.”

Artistic director Rafael Bonachela’s “abstract, often frenetic, yet highly sensuous aesthetic was not the obvious choice to succeed the lyrical and often narrative based work of the very-popular [Graeme] Murphy.”

“The Shakespearean line ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ is associated with Macbeth – though it was also fitting for a Royal New Zealand Ballet performance of Romeo and Juliet after a dancer was accidentally stabbed on stage in Canberra.”

“When the company launches its 2010-11 season Sept. 10 with “Giselle,” all of its dancers will find themselves on the same footing. They’ll be called, simply, “Artists of the Company,” embracing an egalitarian, unranked structure in which everyone has a shot at any particular role.”

Wendy Perron: “Gutsy. Wild. Smart. Original. All four of these young choreographers fit those words … After all the public worrying about the dearth of women choreographers, or the obstacles blocking the paths of women choreographers, this last week at the Joyce was cause for celebration.”

“Imagine an alternative universe where dancers are treated like celebrities: recognized in public, lavished with gifts, fawned over by fans. They even have cocktails named after them. Now get out your atlas and locate Boise, Idaho, where … Trey McIntyre Project is the toast of the town.”

“On Monday, Ms. Kirkland and her husband, choreographer Michael Chernov, will open the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet, a pre-professional dance school designed to compete with intensive courses like the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, which feed students into top companies.”

“Issues with the old place included a main rehearsal studio that was smaller than the stage at Atlanta Ballet’s main performance venue, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. Thus, dancers frequently crashed into walls in the tight room – that is, when not dodging structural columns.”