Category: dance

“Nothing. (laughter) No, it was a joke in the dressing rooms at Judson. We were all naming categories of visual art practitioners and someone said, ‘We were doing postmodern dance at Judson.’ We all cracked up and no one countered us.”

Katherine E. Brown, currently WNYC’s chief operating officer, will “oversee all nonartistic matters” at the ballet, including “fund-raising, finances, marketing, media and education, responsibilities previously held by Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief.”

Drawing on a great deal of new research, and relying wherever possible on contemporary journals and letters, Sjeng Scheijen puts Diaghilev into a different frame to any of his previous biographers. He shows us a man “driven by an overpowering need to explore the mystery of human creativity in its highest form” who “resolved to transform his age and consecrate his life to the cult of beauty.”

Following its near-collapse last year, the Vancouver company is binding itself to its community with “its first choreographic series, Surfacing, which will feature commissioned work by four local choreographers performed by company members and 15 dancers from the Arts Umbrella Graduate Program.”

“‘Forty years,’ reflects Joan Myers Brown on the dance company she founded and continues to run, ‘means really another year that we’ve got to struggle. But, the fact that we are still here is amazing’.”

The withdrawal came on the third day of a hearing expected to last two weeks. Dublin-based designer Jen Kelly had claimed his original costumes for the show were used and altered without his consent, and that he had been “airbrushed out of the history of the show” and not given proper credit for his work.

“Dance companies and artists are to be given the chance to pitch projects to a team of 18 producers, including Sadler’s Wells, The Lowry and The Place, in a Dragon’s Den-style scheme.” (Dragon’s Den is a BBC program that “sees entrepreneurs pitching for investment from some of Britain’s top business brains.”)

“It now seems like such a brilliant idea that it is a surprise no one had thought of it before: pairing figure skaters with hockey players for ice dancing routines in the ultimate ice rink reality show. That’s what the [CBC] has done this fall with Battle of the Blades, a huge hit across Canada.”

“When it rains hard, dancers leap around buckets placed underneath the leaks. The Houston Ballet has struggled with challenging conditions at its headquarters in a former clothing factory since 1984” — but that’s due to change in 2011 with a new $53 million home, now under construction.

In a letter to the editor, the chairman of Texas Ballet Theater explains why her organization is doing without live music, even at the new Winspear Opera House: “It was heartbreaking, but temporarily suspending live music was the financially responsible decision. Had we not done so, there would be no Texas Ballet Theater.”