Category: dance

“Of all the things guys like doing together, dancing – in our society at least – must count among the least likely. Yet a group of middle-aged Peterborough area men have forged rewarding personal bonds and garnered a good deal of admiring public attention doing just that.”

“The European public will be able to see ballets staged by Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre on cinema screens in real time starting from March 31, the organizers of the project said on Wednesday. Some 150 cinemas, mainly in France, will host the real-time shows of [Alexei Ratmansky’s] Flames of Paris ballet on the last day of March.”

“Argentina’s renowned ballet dancer Julio Bocca has been named by Uruguayan president Jose Mujica as the new director of the official Sodre Performances and Dance Company.”

There’s a “boom in street dance, which is edging into the mainstream and changing the landscape of dance. No longer associated with urban, or even suburban centres, it’s reaching into the heartlands.” The form is changing theatre and television as well. (And it was a street-dance group that beat Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent.)

“Tharp – who has been creating dances to Sinatra recordings since 1976, when she created the infamous duet Once More, Frank, for herself and Mikhail Baryshnikov – has complicated reasons for returning to this music, one more time.”

“Top footballers train for two to three hours a day and might do an hour’s work in the gym after that. Their counterparts in ballet kick off with an hour’s Pilates, followed by a 90-minute warm-up and up to six hours’ rehearsal. And perhaps a two-hour performance in the evening. … Football is hard, but ballet is evil.”

“As an effort to reach nontraditional audiences in countries that might not have entirely favorable ideas about the United States, DanceMotion USA, as the State Department project is called, was making headway” on a South African visit. But “breaching fundamental cultural and social differences is not just a matter of good intentions and good will.”

“[V]isiting the city [where she was based] barely seven months after Bausch’s death, I could be forgiven for expecting to find a company still wrapped in the gloom of mourning, or even on the verge of extinction. Instead, Bausch’s colleagues are buoyant in their determination to keep Wuppertal on the international dance map.”

How Anne Bass, the arts patron and dance lover, happened on a gifted young traditional dancer at Angkor Wat, brought him to the U.S., supported his (difficult) transition to Western classical ballet, and chronicled the whole thing on video.

“Chicago’s internationally renowned Joffrey Ballet will be the focus of an unscripted TV series, tentatively titled ‘First Position.’ … ‘It will be similar in feel to something like Project Runway, and focus on our trainees, who are between 17 and 22 years of age’,” says the company’s executive director.