Category: dance

Alastair Macaulay: “It is a pastoral work about life on a farm. … I come from a farming family, and I grew up less than an hour’s drive from the part of Suffolk that gave Ashton most inspiration. Like the ballet’s heroine, I grew up with a view of a farmyard from my bedroom window, and I was often left alone inside the farmhouse to daydream.”

“When it first appeared in 1978, Kontakthof showed a dozen men and a dozen women as they prepared for a formal dance, with the action spinning off into surreal flights of fantasy, frustration and regret. When the piece was revived in 2000, however, Bausch decided to up the ante by presenting two different casts. In one, the performers were teenagers, in the other they were over 65 years old.”

After Christopher Wheeldon’s departure from Morphoses, it’s “important to use this moment to commemorate the remarkable persistence and hard work of those who did stick with their companies for decades and decades. … Those who had to scrounge for the most meager budgets and who were not offered many performance opportunities.”

“After at least one year of turning a blind eye, [Quinnipiac University] Student Government revoked Dance Company’s organizational charter last Wednesday … Dance Company’s yearly audition process was in opposition to the SGA chartering policy that disallows organizations from turning away students.”

Sample tweets: “Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.” “What you didn’t know – fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!” “Don’t let me be fat.”

“A year ago, the troupe was deep in the red. But now it hopes to be in the black by the end of this season – thanks to cutbacks and restructuring. … Ballet administrative jobs have been slashed to four. World-renowned choreographers, in several cases, have let [the company] produce their high-profile ballets royalty-free just to help the ballet get through rocky times.”

“Ballet B.C. has announced it’s just signed a contract to make Emily Molnar its long-term artistic director. Molnar stepped into the position temporarily in July 2009, following the departure of John Alleyne and on the heels of a financial crisis at the company.”

“The Bohemian dance that developed in the 19th century and has been popular mainly with folks of a certain age and ethnicity had appeared to be passe. Now it seems to be making comeback in some of the most unusual places. But it’s also hanging tough at the same old haunts.”

“Music games are about to come full circle, with the next stage of the struggling genre coming from the familiar category of dance music, driven by new motion-capture controllers expected to hit the market this fall.”

“Americans would rather not consider the suffering of people water-boarded, beaten and deprived of sleep as part of our government’s so-called war on terror. Choreographer Jane Comfort tackles what she calls this ‘collective unwillingness to look’ in An American Rendition, a grimly mocking work of contemporary dance-theater.”