Category: dance

Researchers in Australia are investigating whether doing the tango can help people battle depression.

“Except for a $50,000 shortfall in its 2004-05 season, BalletMet has balanced its budget every year. Executive Director Cheri Mitchell attributed the shortage to the poor economy, which has depressed ticket sales and donations from corporations. Bad winter weather also contributed to fewer ticket sales, she said.”

“Dance seems to be coming out of the shadows. The top-rated, top-viewed video on YouTube is The Evolution of Dance, a breezy potted history of popular dance styles – which is also, incidentally, a breezy potted history of popular music, except with dance on top, the way I like it. Elsewhere, kids all over YouTube are showing off their dance moves in a kind of physical karaoke, sometimes on the street, often in their rooms.”

Tina Ramirez, the founder of Ballet Hispanico, announced Monday that she was hanging up her shoes after 38 years as artistic director.

“It is perhaps a disappointment, politically, that America’s foremost female choreographer has such an obsession with manliness, and with telling us that men can perform ballet without becoming homosexuals. But Tharp has a point: the movement style associated, in this country, with standard-issue virility–the way men get around on those big, shambly legs of theirs–is beautiful, and is rarely featured in ballet.”

How do you dance in a city so overwhelmed with visual images? You use the city as your canvas…

“If there is a rule book for becoming a ballet choreographer, Miro Magloire is not following it. He did not study dance as a child, and his first encounter with ballet came in his late teens, when he wandered into an adult beginners class to gain a better understanding of his role as an accompanist. Nor does his résumé include any gaudy star turns with big-name companies.”

“According to preliminary national estimates from Nielsen, “So You Think You Can Dance” averaged a 3.0 rating/9 share in adults 18-49 and 8.8 million viewers overall to dominate the 9 o’clock hour and stand as the night’s top-rated program.”

“This story is very sad, but it has so much wrong in it that I think we have to be careful with what’s been reported here. Maybe Ross was sick, maybe he was confused, it’s hard to know what he actually said.”

An interview intended to be kept under wraps for 40 years has shed remarkable light on an Australian’s disastrous directorship of the Royal Ballet in London.