A dozen dance professionals offer opinions, including this from Virginia Johnson, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s new artistic director: “Balanchine is the gold standard, but we have to let some green shoots come up somewhere.”
Category: dance
Summing Up The 00’s For Dance
“If we measure the new choreography of the last decade against that of earlier ones, then 2000-9 was thin.”
A Motorcycle Ballet
“Feld Entertainment Inc., the live entertainment production company behind Disney on Ice and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, is taking an edgy turn with its latest production, ‘Nuclear Cowboyz,’ a post-apocalyptic motocross spectacle that sprinkles scantily clad dancers and special effects atop a gas-fueled ballet of high-flying motorbikes.”
In Dance, The ’00s Were Gently Transformative (And Not)
Among the changes: “While waiting for the new savior, ballet has admitted the language of modern dance into its world and, very cautiously, sought solutions in the movement lexicons of non-European cultures.” Also: “In just a few years, YouTube has become an indispensable resource for the dance world.”
Nikolaj Hübbe On (Sort Of) Choreographing His First Ballet
“You know basically we just had to tell a story, so we weren’t exactly choreographing, we just put some steps together and made the steps propel the action … I don’t know if that’s choreography – it’s just steps.”
Paul Taylor And The ‘Zunch’ Factor
“All Taylor dancers have emulated his insatiable appetite for doing what should be impossible, for persevering against all odds, for challenging the very laws of physics, for conjuring brave new worlds. Taylor even invented a word – zunch – to describe this heroism.”
Reuniting Ballet With Opera At The Met
“The two arts, once inseparable, have grown apart. The Metropolitan Opera, however, has been making a concerted effort to improve this situation under … Peter Gelb. … I can think of no dance company that has been able [as the Met has done] to commission new work by three of the biggest names in choreography today: [Mark] Morris, [Alexei] Ratmansky and [Christopher] Wheeldon.”
Israeli Dance Legend Nira Paz Explains It All For You
Says the 73-year-old, in her plainspoken Israeli way: “It is very hard to be a member of a group of megalomaniacs and egoists, every one of them … I don’t miss that life; it was a life full of tension. … [The stage is] like a drug, you need to have it.”
A Movie That “Gets” Dance
“La Danse is the only film I know that successfully conveys what it feels like, physically, to be a dancer–to get inside a step or a phrase and to make it work on your own body–but also to live, as dancers do, absorbed in the repetitive, ritualized, and seemingly timeless practices of their art. None of this is monkish or self-sacrificing, as it is often portrayed. It is simply what dancers do: it is their work.”
How The 00’s Changed Dance
“Technology has been the defining trendsetter in dance. Look at the rise of dance contests on TV. But the bad news is that concert-dance programming on public television has all but vanished this decade.”