Category: dance

“The dapper Franklin is an engaging raconteur. Half his charm is the occasionally naughty stories he tells in his soft British accent. If you’ve seen the 2005 film ‘Ballets Russes,’ you’ve seen ‘Freddie’ — a walking, talking history of ballet in the last century.”

“Pantsula is the language of the township. Complicated rhythmic formations, gangster swagger and tsotsitaal (scamto) make up the vocabulary of this edgy dance form. … ‘The American influence is like wild fire, destroying everything South African,’ says [Bongani] Linda. Hip hop, he says, is becoming increasingly popular and this is leading to the downfall of ‘pure’ pantsula.”

“A passionate group of dance instructors is nurturing the fast-growing line-dance community by offering affordable lessons at churches, libraries and community centers. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, more people used to go out to dance and enjoy themselves. So we are trying to get people to come out and dance again. And it’s working. With insanely low rates -just $3 per class.”

“With 28 choreographers from 10 countries presenting 16 world premieres in as many days, … 30,000 spectators are expected to attend the [Montpellier Dance F]estival, which ends July 4. And it’s here that Angelin Preljocaj took to the stage for the first time in 16 years in Un Funambule (‘The Tightrope Walker’).”

“It seems the melancholic music is a perfect match for the typical Finnish soul. ‘It’s a little bit sad, and it’s beautiful,’ a woman tells me at a dimly lit Helsinki restaurant that regularly hosts dances. Paradoxically, when she moves to these sad melodies, she feels happy. (She didn’t want to be named, her reason being another national trait: shyness.)”

This week the coach of South Africa’s national rugby team defended an eye-gouging incident by one of his players by saying, in effect, that rugby ain’t ballet, it’s a violent sport. So South African Ballet Theatre invited the players to take a class with them and see how they fared opposite some real men in tights.

Pina Bausch could “take you to a higher place that you didn’t even know existed. Not all the time and not every time, but she could do it. How? One way was by demanding that her performers dig deep within their own memories and feelings; famously, Bausch said that she was not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.” A clip-by-clip guide to her work.

Alastair Macaulay: “Not that its standards of delivery were low; what was dismaying was that the competition … elicited from the dancers a great deal of what is anti-artistic, sensationalist and trite about ballet.”

Alastair Macaulay: “What is scarcely diminished by Ms. Bausch’s death is the art of dance. There were good dance moments in her work, but they were usually of secondary interest and choreographically of no lasting import. Her big-scale dance episodes were mainly wild and vehement forms of not quite coherent expressionism. Another strange component of Ms. Bausch’s dance style was bad ballet. The way her performers would make a point of forcing themselves to do adagios, turns and jumps … was part of the extraordinary masochism she often placed onstage.”

The death of Pina Bausch “is an appalling shock and a tragedy not only for the dance world, but also for the entire international arts world. Bausch’s visionary work as dancer, choreographer and creator of the Tanztheater Wuppertal had a reach way, way beyond the confines of the German town where she worked. Theatre and opera simply wouldn’t look the way they do today without Bausch; she has also had an enormous influence on visual art and cinema….”