Category: dance

It’s been ten years since Minneapolis’s decrepit Shubert Theatre was moved to a new location and slated for renovation as a major regional dance hub. But the project has repeatedly fallen short of funding targets and the renovation has never begun. Now, a new $1.5m challenge grant offers new hope, but the Shubert must raise an additional $6.5m to get the money.

… it’s dancing about aviation. This weekend at “Breaking Ground: A Dance Charrette,” five choreographers presented site-specific works made for Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first municipal airport.

“You might know him as one of the world’s most fêted conductors, but as the artistic and general director of the Mariinsky he’s responsible for the Kirov Ballet as well as the Kirov Opera. Over the past decade, this firebrand Russian maestro has consolidated his influence on the ballet.”

“An Argentine tango themed on the Tale of Genji, a Japanese novel written 1,000 years ago, will be performed this month in Tokyo and Nagoya.” (The tangueros are Argentine and Polish, with a Noh dancer playing the Buddha; the instruments include both bandoneon and shamisen.)

“Plans for Rambert Dance Company’s new £14 million purpose-built home [in south London] have been thrown into question, following English Heritage and Westminster City Council’s decision to legally challenge a proposed 144-metre tower block development which will house the venue.”

“The US choreographer is now 89, and makes his post-show stage appearances in a wheelchair. But, having pretty much reinvented human movement over many decades and more than 200 elliptical works, he remains, as ever, at the absolute cutting-edge of contemporary dance.”

“Clarity of intention aside, the [Lyon Dance Biennial] is one of the most ambitious and important dance festivals in the world, and its largeness of scale and intention is splendid to see at a time of ever-shrinking financing for the arts.”

“Salsa fever is raging in China, with more than a dozen Latin dance studios having opened in the capital in the last four years. This week, an estimated 4,000 people from across the country and abroad are expected to attend the third annual China Salsa Congress in Beijing for four days of performances and competition, including for a second year an event on the Great Wall.”

The Australian Ballet and the indigenous company Bangarra Dance Theatre have traveled to France with their joint project, Rites, a new take on The Rite of Spring that pays tribute to 30,000 years of Aboriginal culture. What do the French make of it? Critic Rosita Boisseau, looking “somewhat shell-shocked,” said, “It’s very strange. It left me a bit confused. All the dancers suddenly appearing covered head to toe in mud… It’s a completely different approach, and we have to be very curious and open-minded towards this kind of composition.”

The Leeds-based Phoenix dance company has fired its director and resident choreographer, Javier de Frutos — mainly because “under his direction Phoenix had ceased to be a sufficiently ‘black’ company. Even though De Frutos is himself Venezuelan and the rest of his company are a completely representative, urban, ethnic mix, Leeds seem to want to put back the clock to the time when Phoenix was a ‘flagship’ black company.”