Category: dance

In fact, walking is the first thing he watches dancers do at auditions: “I can eliminate half of them by how they walk. They’re either too self-assured or not assured enough, or they’re just weird. You can tell an awful lot. … It was George Bush’s walk that gave him away. It was a pseudo-militaristic thing that he had no experience with. A total phony.”

Taylor Gordon remembers doing four shows a day some days as a corps member in the Radio City Christmas Show – at a time when she was taking ballet class 30 hours a week, getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees, working the occasional magazine internship, and going to countless auditions. “Now, thinking back,” she says, “I don’t know how I did this.”

Judith Mackrell: “As a critic I’ve long resigned myself to the idea that dance is a lowly member of the arts community. … But suddenly, dance has got noisy and visible, and everyone wants to be its best friend. … And when the carnival is over, I worry that serious dance faces a bleak future. In hard times, how many casual punters will pay to see dance in the theatre? How many councils will fund a dancer-in-residence rather than care for the elderly?”

“The Sheremetevsky Palace unveiled a new exhibition Saturday devoted to the famous Soviet ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, who was for years ignored by his native country after defecting to the West.”

“Leotards, tights, leg warmers and ballet slippers – these are bedrock accessories visible at most dance studios. But add ropes, pulleys, harnesses, Bungee cords and even such exotic-sounding implements as carabiners and the Lyra hoop, and you get an idea of the needs of Ameba Acrobatic & Aerial Dance, a Chicago troupe intent on taking dance in a special direction: up, sometimes way up, into the air.”

“Ballet is a formula and it’s unorganic. … Humans were not meant to move that way, let alone while jumping high in the air. … I’m not a ballet dancer. It’s never been natural for me … When you put on the white tights, and you see some other 20-year-old kid leaping about, you ask yourself, ‘Why would I carry on? I’ve done it so well, for so long.’ When is it time to say, ‘Enough’?”

“It starts in the unsuccessful first production of 1877, when Tchaikovsky’s new music was accompanied by a staging that inspired too little enthusiasm … It would be 15 years before the music finally got the staging it deserved, the iconic version in St. Petersburg created by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. But the oral tradition in ballet theatre was strong, and the images of Swan Lake coupled with its music were what people clung to, not to any idea of the inviolability of great choreography, which was considered soft material, to be remodelled at will. And so it changed and changed.”

This Friday, Canadian dancer/choreographer Paul-André Fortier begins a New York run of his Solo 30×30 – a half-hour work he performs outdoors (regardless of weather) at noon every day for 30 days.

“DNA is a non-profit organization renting 25,000 square feet of space in a city-owned building on Chambers Street. But the group says without a break on the rent, which is close to $70,000 a month, they’re as good as out.” But City Hall has granted the company a month and a half to renegotiate the lease for the facility.

“What might the spawn of sport and the arts – never the easiest bedfellows – actually resemble? Last week gave us a clue” in Big Dance 2010, which “ran for eight days … and climaxed on Saturday with a procession of thousands from the Southbank Centre, over the Golden Jubilee bridge, and into Trafalgar Square for one big wiggle.”