Category: dance

“The push has some purists grumbling that the true square-dancing tradition … is being ruined. In particular, older dancers complain that young people are too loud and don’t respect traditional clothing or music. Despite the complaints, leaders stress that they must update or die.”

“Some of the featured ballerinas – Darci Kistler, Jennifer Ringer, Wendy Whelan – have been in the company two decades or more. Kistler, unbelievably, will have 30 years of dancing behind her when she retires next year. … [T]here is no substitute for the assurance and poetic revelation that veteran artists … can bring to the most sophisticated works.”

“The cringeworthy ‘dad dancing’ witnessed at wedding receptions every weekend may be an unconscious way in which ageing males repel the attention of young women, leaving the field clear for men at their sexual peak. ‘The message their dancing sends out is “stay away, I’m not fertile”,’ said [research psychologist] Dr Peter Dad.”

That’s the great issue around which British psychologist Dr. Peter Lovatt (known around his university campus as “Dr. Dance”) is building his career: an “investigation into ‘dance confidence’ (DC) – the factor that makes the difference between you sitting glued to the bar seat and actually going for a boogie – and how it changes with age and gender.”

What of the whimsical godfather-figure who gives Clara the soldier-shaped toy? Minnesota dancer/choreographer John Munger’s “Nutbuster!! The Ballet is a one-man show about who this mysterious man might become in his later years – and it’s not a pretty sight.”

“The foot is at the root of poetry. Lines of verse are divided into feet, and that’s because words, music and dance were once intimately connected. And in terms of physical complexity, the foot is among the most miraculous mechanisms of the body.”

“Ballet gets this image of wholesome, reassuring, pretty — not that those are bad things, but that’s a stamp that’s been placed on ballet because of the relentlessness of The Nutcracker.”

“Forty of the company’s 93 dancers – including 20 of its 30 principals – are onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, giving seven performances of two mixed bills. Meanwhile, their colleagues are dancing more traditional December fare back at home at Lincoln Center” – Balanchine’s Nutcracker, of course.

“I’ve always said that my luck is that I never dreamt of being a ballerina, … [and] the only thing that drives me is the pleasure on stage, and what I could do there, what kind of experience I can have there and what I could feel. So if people were trying to make me do things that I wasn’t really happy to do, then there was no way I was going to do it. … I’m not going to waste my time.”

“From Bangladeshi folk dance to the moves of Michael Jackson, [the star British dancer/choreographer] describes how he finds clarity within chaos.”