Category: dance

Tim Etchells reports from a workshop in Phnom Penh where members of a company trying to save traditional Khmer dance interact in movement with “sounds collected by the dancers played out from a laptop and a complex array of homemade sensors, motion triggers and pressure pads.”

“Members of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet will perform in Havana’s Karl Marx theater next week in their first appearance on the island in 30 years.” The Russian dancers’ appearance alongside the Cuban National Ballet at Havana’s international book fair is “part of a renewal of relations between Cuba and Russia.”

“Six years ago Friday, choreographer Erika Chong Shuch went to San Francisco City Hall to witness hundreds of same-sex couples marry in the gleaming Beaux Arts rotunda. … To mark the anniversary, Shuch created Love Everywhere,” a piece for 60 dancers in wedding garb to be performed in that same rotunda.

In late October, Eddie Stegge of Walnut Creek’s Diablo Ballet was attacked and clubbed by two teenagers who left him with skull fractures and brain injury. Stegge, who “has had to relearn how to walk, move his right arm and see things on his right side,” will perform with the company later this month.

“After discussions with the Sony [Centre] and attempts to have Toronto city hall officials intervene, the ballet company created a later slot for its own Russian program,” though it still worries that the Kirov’s visit in March of next year will be a drain on its box office.

“This feels like a Mack truck falling out of the sky and hitting us,” says Kevin Garland, executive director of the National Ballet of Canada. “It’s great to have the Kirov coming to Toronto, but the timing couldn’t be worse for us, and we didn’t hear anything about it in time for us to plan accordingly.”

“The idea of opera singers moving choreographically is tantalizing. About the specific fantasy of a dancing Carmen, however, I would caution, be careful what you wish for. Many great opera singers are just not built for dancing.”

Kalpana, a filmed dance-drama by Uday Shankar (Ravi’s oldest brother, and considered the father of modern Indian dance), will be reassembled and restored by Martin Scorcese’s World Cinema Institute. No complete print of the film exists in India.

Yes, it has cheesy production values and “pits dance styles against each other, usually to the disadvantage of contemporary choreography. Most of the numbers are stunt-heavy hip-hop routines, disco, Broadway, lindy hop and jazz.” Somehow none of that hinders its addictiveness.