Category: dance

“After four years without an official music director, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has a three-year contract with Charles Barker, giving him the dual titles of music director and conductor.”

“Earlier this year, in an unprecedented series of intensive sessions, the cognitive science department of UCSD filmed, recorded, interviewed and analysed the early creative choreography of dancers from Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance group. Cognitive scientists spend their time learning how people learn, if that’s not a fabulously stupid oversimplification of their alchemic process: from relatively simple stuff, such as studying the most efficient way to count a table of disparate coins, to the big stuff such as this, understanding creativity.”

“Because there are no wings in this concert hall, audience members were greeted with Julie Kent pitching her body forward to stretch her hamstrings and David Hallberg, with mauve leg warmers pulled over his costume, marking steps. Such a sight, below 14th Street, would hardly raise an eyebrow.”

Juan Escalante, the company’s executive director: “I had a friend who worked for the New York City Opera, which is in the same building as the New York City Ballet. There was an opening in finance. My friend said, ‘You’re a numbers guy. There’s a job here.'”

“For Yuan Yuan Tan, the problem was the floors. For Tiit Helimets, Tan’s partner in a Swan Lake that dazzled the Chinese, the problem was the beds. The common theme: hardness.”

“The company has gone through so many changes over eight decades it may not be recognizable from its origins as the Dorothy Alexander Concert Group in 1929. … John McFall, the company’s artistic director since 1994, attributes its staying power partially to its connectedness with the Atlanta community.”

Chicago choreographer Winifred Haun on her new full-length piece, Promise: “I first got the idea when I read [Steinbeck’s] East of Eden in 2003 as part of a mother’s book club.” But she didn’t stick closely to the original: “The book is very masculine. It’s all about the men and the activities of the men and the violence of the men.” She’s focused on two underdeveloped female characters.

“Cloud Gate dancers study t’ai chi, martial arts, meditation and calligraphy – and it shows. They move with the explosive force of martial arts and yet maintain the poise and flow of t’ai chi and the quiet intensity of meditation.”

“Stewart Kershaw, the longtime music director and conductor of the Pacific Northwest Ballet orchestra, today resigned from his post.” In a statement, he said, “Please understand that I am now 68, have been a professional ballet conductor for the last 43 years, and recently completed 25 seasons as PNB’s Music Director.”

Dance purists love to decry Pilobolus, now 40, “for its commercials (horrors!) for cars and the National Football League,” work that is anathema to “those who feel that existing on the cultural fringes conveys a certain kind of quasi-moral merit, or is, at the very least, chic.” But the troupe’s art is hardly suffering from its financial success.