“Ballet Arizona sold 10,359 tickets to the Valentine’s weekend production [of Sleeping Beauty], selling out three of five performances … [and] set[ting] set a Ballet Arizona record for best-selling show, executives said. It was also the largest production in the company’s history and featured more than 80 dancers.”
Category: dance
Mark Morris And The Modernist Dance Country Club
“I’m delighted at the way that this [career] has gone and that I’m not really part of the very minute superesoteric modern dance club, which I’m not a member of. I was never invited; it’s the Groucho Marx thing. … It’s like: That? You’re dancing to that music?”
The Frenzied Birth Of Washington Ballet’s New ‘Gatsby’
“Making a ballet from the ground up is deep wallow in microeconomics and minutiae. Creating a three-minute pas de deux takes [choreographer Septime] Webre some five hours of studio time. … Webre has to keep to a schedule of six-hour days carved like therapy sessions into 55-minute blocks. Rehearsals have resembled nothing so much as a manic pinball game of bodies set to eight-count bars of music.”
So You Think Bobsledding Is Tougher Than Ballet Dancing, Do You?
UK bobsledder Dan Money and his partner wiped out on the track in Vancouver last weekend, and he got a gash on his leg. “It’s just one of those things,” he shrugged, “but it’s bobsleigh, you know, not ballet dancing.” Well, Sadlers Wells chief Alistair Spalding has a few things to say about that.
How Fabulously Awful Were The Olympic Ice Dancing Costumes?
“Ice dancing, for years the whorishly exotic stepchild of figure skating, exceeded all of our expectations these Olympics. … There were adorable University of Michigan coeds pretending to be Bollywood stars. And there was that infamous native folk dance, seemingly honed at the John Mayer school of racial sensitivity. And we loved it all!”
How A London Ballet Company Flourished In Birmingham
“At a time when [Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet] was floundering in London…, Birmingham City Council made an offer the company couldn’t refuse.” Now “the 58 dancers enjoy the kind of fabulous facilities their predecessors could only dream about at their old home in London,” and their work is “a magnet for dance in Britain’s second city.”
How Akram Khan Describes His Dance (Not As Fusion)
“For me, it has a lot to do with mathematics, not just the vocabulary and gestures of the dance, but the energy. I call it a confusion between kathak and contemporary. There’s no such thing as fusion in dance, such as in food, where two ingredients fuse together. My body got confused when I ventured into contemporary dance. My work comes out of that chaos of the body.”
Protests Greet Touring Israeli Dance Company (Yet Again)
“Advocates for Palestinian rights have called for a boycott of the Israel Ballet, which is performing Sunday at Brooklyn College. The advocates said that there would be protests at the college’s Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts to denounce what they call Israel’s ‘apartheid and colonial policies’.”
An Elton John Bio-Ballet
Choreographer and Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grand-Maître “describes the $1 million ballet as melding Bob Fosse-inspired jazz choreography and classical ballet en pointe with urban hip-hop, rollerblading, drag queens and Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics. Broken mirrors, white powder, homoerotic angels and a spinning piano are among the imagery used in the production.”
Florida Dance Festival Quits Miami, Returns To Tampa
“In 1998, when the Florida Dance Festival moved from Tampa to Miami, some observers worried that dance students from around the state would not follow. Those worries proved to be correct, and the festival is returning to the University of South Florida in Tampa in June.”