Category: dance

“Ballets by the choreographers Melissa Barak, Mauro Bigonzetti, Peter Martins, Wayne McGregor, Benjamin Millepied, Alexei Ratmansky, and Christopher Wheeldon will all have their world premieres. Four commissioned scores will also make their debut, including a violin concerto composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, for Mr. Martins’ work.” Five of the new dances will have scenery designed by architect Santiago Calatrava.

Dance has skyrocketed in popularity among participants and spectators, males and females, children and adults — and they come from a wide swath of backgrounds. One significant indicator: “The ratio of boys to girls applying to the Royal Ballet School used to be 20:80,” but “now it is 50:50.”

“Creating more than 120 dances since the early 1980s — for the barefoot artists of his Mark Morris Dance Group as well as pointe shoe-clad primas — Morris has brought the scores of composers in virtually every style vividly to life onstage.”

“Richard Alston is so old school it’s almost endearing. He’s been making dances for nearly 40 years and continues to make them just as he pleases, even if that means he’s completely out of step with a younger, more unruly generation.”

Judith Mackrell: “[What] interests me is the impact he’s made on the acting style of the Royal Ballet, his home company. Famously, MacMillan’s ballets occupy a dramatic terrain that’s darker, more elusive and more contradictory than that of the classical repertory – which means that any dancer performing his work has to learn to act outside the standard lexicon.”

“‘I thought it was lost or destroyed,’ said [Nicolas] Petrov, founding director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and the man who transported the [stage] curtain from New York to Pittsburgh in a rented truck in 1976. Five years later,” after it was donated to the Carnegie Museum of Art, “he was told that nobody knew where it was.”

“I had heard about the fights with Louis Horst that were part of Graham’s creative process, but I had no idea how violent their sessions were – and how necessary. … Martha growled, hissed, and whirred her way through explosive movements she had just choreographed,  … [and Louis] forced Martha to assign counts to it.”

“At the end of the company’s New Year’s Eve performance of Rudolf Nureyev’s Nutcracker, the principal dancer Karl Paquette learned that he had been promoted to the exalted status of étoile, or star.” The rank is at the pinnacle of the company’s famously strict hierarchy.

“In less than five years at [the Seattle company], … he has added a remarkable 57 ballets to the repertory. … While many artistic directors remain in the wings, except for the occasional speech at a gala event, Mr. Boal follows almost every performance with a discussion.”

“Afshin Ghaffarian’s identity papers described him as an actor, a profession that was not to the liking of the Basij militia … [But] acting was a cover. Ghaffarian is a dancer – an activity banned by Iran’s Islamic rulers.” The 23-year-old recounts his struggle to make dance within Iran, his capture at a protest and his escape.