Category: dance

“In contrast to the outsize personalities who dominate much of modern dance’s history, he is a thoroughly 21st-century leader, with a belief that bigger is usually worse when it comes to dance (work on grand stages, he has said, ‘looks like a bunch of No. 2 pencils in an earthquake’) and little interest in lending his name to a specific style or ideology.”

“St. John the Baptist Church in Lawrenceville may be no more, but its buildings live on in new ways – the historic main church has been a popular brewpub and restaurant since 1996, and now its former rectory will become a residence for teenage students at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School.”

“So I talked to the team and to the dancers about bird behaviour, including my research on corvids [crows, rooks and jays]. I drew on examples such as the dance of the blue manakin, which, for me, is avian tango, and the Lawes’s parotia (the six-plumed bird of paradise), which has a courtship dance that looks like a bird ballet.”

“By outlining ways in which his dances might be conserved without the dance company for which they were created, Cunningham … introduced a forward-looking program for modern-dance professionals, who have always focused on the here and now. … But can Cunningham’s scheme really be carried out? Can the dancers and the dances be disentwined?”

Manohla Dargis: “This born-again version of The Red Shoes, digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, … is essential viewing because even if you think you have seen the movie before its restoration, if you’re under 60, you probably haven’t seen it anywhere near its original Technicolor glory.”

Founded in 1989, Bangarra is now the flagship performing company of Australia’s (and perhaps the world’s) aboriginal peoples. “When you sit down and see a Bangarra show, you don’t realise you’ve just been given a 50-minute history lesson, you just feel like you’ve been taken on a journey and it comes back to you in waves.”

Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event “records three days of rehearsals by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Craneway Pavilion,” a converted automobile factory near San Francisco, about a year before Cunningham’s death. The documentary film reminds Alastair Macaulay of Degas’s backstage-at-the-ballet paintings.

A.O. Scott: “[The documentary’s] greater virtue, and the substance of Mr. Wiseman’s particular genius, is the way it transfixes you with the inner workings of an institution you may not otherwise care about.”

Palm Beach Atlantic University, a privately funded 3,500-student Christian school, paid $1.85 million for the two-story building in downtown Palm Beach as a home for its theater program. Ballet Florida declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy and shut down in July.

“Dohee Lee and Jo Kreiter will be honored for outstanding achievement by [January’s] 24th annual Isadora Duncan Awards, which recognize contributions to Bay Area dance….” The San Francisco Ballet and the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival received seven nominations apiece.