Category: dance

“PETA is planning to hand out anti-fur stickers to children waiting to see the Pennsylvania Ballet’s staging of The Nutcracker at the Academy of Music on Saturday afternoon. The stickers … will be attached to leaflets explaining how animals suffer because of the fur, leather, and exotic-skins trade.”

“Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes. The giants of the Harlem Renaissance loom large in Uptown, Matthew Rushing’s new work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.” The piece is “structured as an episodic tour through Harlem in the 1920s.”

“One reason for this has been the dramatic increase in venues. After decades of being squeezed into cramped and dirty spaces, a mix of private and public money has finally given dance the theatres it needs.”

Despite the fact that ballet’s breakout superstars tend to be male (Nureyev, Baryshnikov), US companies have to bring in most of their male principals from abroad, and boys are reluctant to study ballet. Why? Exactly the reason you think. But a few teachers in Southern California are working to change this.

“Not so long ago, I was chatting with a friend who is a dance critic. We talked about all the talented dancers and choreographers … who’d been lost to AIDS. As she saw it, there is a void in dance choreography because so many young men didn’t make it out of the plague. … What if they’d all lived?“

“The musicians’ union began protesting last year, when the TBT first decided to use taped music rather than a live orchestra to provide the soundtrack for its performances. But the union has succeeded at making its dissatisfaction more visible since it began picketing performances of The Nutcracker at the Winspear Opera House last week.”

“Gaspard Louis has an interesting sense of timing. After dancing and co-creating dances with Pilobolus for 10 years, he went into banking, earned good money – and got out just in time to avoid the collapse of 2008.” He’s gone on to found Gaspard & Company, which makes its professional debut this week in Durham.

“Michael Nunn, one half of high-profile dance duo the Ballet Boyz, has criticised the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing live tour, claiming the show deprives professional dance companies of ticket sales and audiences.”

“Royal Ballet dancer Miyako Yoshida has announced her retirement after 14 years of dancing with the company.” Her final performance will be “Romeo and Juliet in Tokyo as part of the Royal Ballet’s 2010 summer tour to Japan.”

“American Ballet Theater is announcing on Monday that it will establish a “Nutcracker” franchise at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2010. The performances will go head to head with City Ballet’s longstanding “Nutcracker” run, the Balanchine version that has been around since 1954. To make matters more interesting, the Mark Morris company plans to stage its own run of Mr. Morris’s version, “The Hard Nut,” at the Brooklyn Academy, to close three days before the Ballet Theater version opens.”