Category: dance

Twenty-year-old Isaac Akiba, who was “promoted to Boston Ballet’s company last month,” is “the first Boston kid to rise to its ranks through Citydance, a program that has introduced dance to more than 85,000 children in the Boston public schools since its inception in 1991.”

Choreographer Trey McIntyre “liken[s] the spurban (which is short for spur-of-the-moment urban performance) to the hot lunch jam scene from the 1980 movie Fame and the T-Mobile commercial in which several hundred seemingly ordinary passersby break into joyous, unison movement at London’s Liverpool Street Station.”

“Chinese ballet aficionados like the classics: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty are all routinely performed here.” But they’re “also used to uniformity, in the way their dancers look, dress and move.” So when the company gave a mixed program, including modern ballets, for its first performance in Shanghai, viewers weren’t sure what to make of it at first.

The funding body “has raised concerns over the ‘sustainability’ of careers and leadership within dance, after research revealed that 23% of people working in the sector earned less than £5,000 last year.”

“Two performances on the coasts will kick off the company’s season, giving national audiences the chance to see works that Utahns turned out for earlier this year.” The higher profile “comes in a year marked by staff furloughs and pay cuts … due to reduced corporate and foundation contributions.”

Says artistic director Kevin McKenzie: “We are a company rooted in repertory. But we also do new things, and those are the ones that are the most stressful. The Bard season allows me to take them out on their own. It’s always best to get a look at it at least once [before a NYC season], so you have a chance to make any adjustments.”

“Orlando Ballet was shut out of funding by Orange County’s cultural-tourism program for the coming year because of a shortage of county grant money. The funds come from tourist-development tax receipts,”  i.e., from a sector that has been hit hard by the economic downturn.

“It would be easy to dismiss the Global Dance contest as a gimmick. But simply by offering a prize of £2,000 and the chance to perform in the theatre’s 2010 Sampled programme, [Sadler’s] Wells has arguably come up with a fabulous scheme for flagging up its own cool credentials – and, more importantly, for diverting punters to its own website.”

“Bengali boy from south London learns Indian dance, tours with a British theatre director based in France, studies in Brussels, then goes global. Now the world’s his oyster.”

The influence of Cirque du Soleil’s risqué-ish show for Sin City wasn’t direct, exactly. But a gig with the production brought dancer Bernard Gaddis to Nevada, and he has gone on to found and direct the Las Vegas Contemporary Dance Theater.