Category: dance

“[The dancers] spend Rock the Ballet bopping, leaping, kicking, spinning and showing what one supposes is meant to define the cocksure urban man to their sometimes squealing audiences. Opening night included so many pockets of whooping and yipping individuals that they almost quaintly brought to mind groupies.”

The documentary Only When I Dance “follows two teenage ballet dancers – Irlan Santos da Silva and Isabela Coracy – struggling to dance their way out of poverty and become international ballet stars.” Filming in the Rio slums “was a risky business … that involved bribing a ‘community leader’ daily.”

“Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, impatient dancers, choreographers, critics and audience members all hoped that a new breed of innovators would appear to transform theatrical dance the way that Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev radically renewed and updated classical ballet in the first decade of the 20th. We’re still waiting.”

“Boston Ballet has seen a boom in “Nutcracker” sales this season. It has sold 64,821 tickets so far for the production, which runs through Dec. 27. That’s 10,000 more than last year at this time. But success has come at a cost. Online ticket brokers have been snapping up Opera House seats, leaving patrons with little choice but to pay as much as three times face value for a ticket.”

Nearly 12 million viewers tuned in to see Chris Hollins, the BBC sports reporter, win Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday night.

“Despite the economy, the ballet’s 2009 subscription sales in Melbourne were the best since 1993, and in Sydney subscriptions were the highest since 2001. Single-ticket sales in both cities also increased.”

Alistair Spalding: “I believe that part of the furore over Javier’s work and its ability to shock is that no one, including the BBC, realised that a piece of choreography could do this. … The reality is that dance is often disturbing, ugly, confrontational, violent and sometimes sexually explicit.”

The Guardian offers a newcomer’s guide to the man who “went from vogueing his way to first place in a dance contest to mixing ballet, jazz and offbeat moves in shows the world over.”

A Javier de Frutos work, whose “deformed pope, pregnant nuns and wild sex” ignited controversy at its London premiere, was set for broadcast, in a pre-watershed slot, until the BBC changed its mind. The choreographer “is angry at the ‘naivety’ of the BBC for assuming that ‘they could broadcast it before the watershed just because it was ballet.'”

“It’s sadly true that there are ballet companies whose only annual performances are of ‘The Nutcracker,’ and that almost every American ballet company relies on its ‘Nutcracker’ performances as its most reliable draw. … But let’s not blame the ‘Nutcracker’ [for the field’s troubles] just because it is the cash cow of American ballet.”