Category: dance

The company is “still trying to assess the extent of damage to 48 years of costumes and sets stored over three floors in an old Kensington wool store. Hail blocked drain pipes, sending contaminated water flooding through the sawtooth ceiling windows of the 108-year-old building.”

Angel Corella: “I thought the company was very necessary for Spanish dancers who wanted to have their career in their country. So it’s been many years of work and, now, a few years of double the work, but also the double the success. It’s amazing. We had five days of Swan Lake and all the tickets were sold out in less than two hours. It was a little bit scary.”

“During a recent rehearsal on the Lower East Side, the choreographer and dancer Jody Oberfelder came tearing across a small studio like a downtown banshee. Her bright magenta hair was tucked under a striped crash helmet … She was soon joined by similarly dressed dancers, pushing and banging into one another with abandon as if in a mosh pit at a punk concert.”

Wounded in an attack on a Tel Aviv center for LGBT youth, a pair of teenagers “had studied dance, concentrating on ballroom and hip-hop, but their gunshot injuries left them without sensation or mobility below their ribs. Confined to wheelchairs, they believed their dancing days were over. Enter Daniel Banks and Adam McKinney of New York-based DNAWORKS.”

“She’s done Broadway, now it’s on to the ballet. On Monday, New York City Ballet announced that Patti LuPone will make her New York City Ballet debut in a new production of The Seven Deadly Sins as part of the company’s 2011 spring season.”

“When dancers improvise, do they think about how they’re moving, or does it just come naturally? And if they are thinking, what kinds of thoughts are they having?”

“There’s hardly an area of dance that Ms. Tharp hasn’t conquered since she entered the New York scene in 1965, two years after graduating from Barnard College. As her work on movies like “Hair” and “Amadeus” attests, Ms. Tharp embraces the chance to reach large audiences.”

From another of The Guardian‘s ‘Step-by-Step Guides’ to dancemakers: “Inspired by the dancing of Pavlova and Fonteyn, Ashton’s lyrical, restrained choreography created a very English kind of ballet.”

“Spinning disco balls, a booming bass beat, outlandish costumes and Madonna are what usually come to mind when you think of voguing. But beneath all the trimmings is a dance form. Something of a cult form, too, but the Whitney Biennial has trained a new spotlight on it this month with Untitled and Untitled (New Way) by the video artist Rashaad Newsome.”

“[T]he company is honoring someone who’s not only its emeritus board of trustees chair but also a former dancer herself who has never lost her passion for the art. As the wife of billionaire Warren Hellman, to be sure, Chris Hellman has opened her checkbook over the years.”