Category: dance

“The defunct Ohio Ballet wants to use endowment gifts to pay $470,000 in bills. But not so fast, say the foundations that provided the money.”

“The Kennedy Center’s “Ballet Across America” survey over the past week proved that the country has dancing talent to burn. Yet though the companies were culled from coast to coast, they are part of a small world. More than one company director referred to the gathering as Old Home Week; members of all nine of the companies have various intertwined histories and professional connections.”

“When Kenneth MacMillan choreographed Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet in 1965, he created the most fiercely coveted ballerina role of them all. The canon isn’t short of tragic heroines – Giselle, Odette in Swan Lake, Tatiana in Onegin – but it’s the beautiful, doomed Juliet every ballerina dreams of dancing.”

“Dorian Gray reimagined as a gay aftershave model for our times?” No, it’s not a performance art piece or a bad TV movie – it’s the latest project from star choreographer Matthew Bourne. “Bourne is toying with the possibility of giving Dorian a doppelganger, an evil twin, and is still working out how to avoid having a literal version of the novel’s notorious portrait in the attic.”

“Tharp, unlike so many choreographers who are most secure with a pas de deux or a solo, is a master (mistress?) of group dynamics: Everything’s a rush, a melee, a jumble, except that everything’s crystal clear. She’s not a mere traffic manager, though; things not only work out, they go somewhere.”

“With all the big international groups we bring in, it’s getting harder for us to sell the regional companies of America. It’s important to see these wonderful companies; some of them have never been here before, like my alma mater, the Kansas City Ballet. I wanted to have them all, but I couldn’t give them each a full week; this is a way that made sense for them and for us.”

“David Michalek that projects images of dancers on three 12-metre-tall screens in hyper-slow motion. For these towering figures, each five-second dance movement plays out over 10 minutes in minute detail. That yield is a study of the dancer, both in physical form and emotional expression, writ large in a public arena, with audience interaction en masse considered crucial to the experience.”

“It seems as if every channel worth its programming salt, from broadcast networks to TLC, Lifetime and Bravo, has trotted out a dance-based reality show. As an unexpected side effect, street dance is now being popularized through television and on the shows’ Web sites, and newer moves are being documented and codified in a way not seen before.”

Traditional dance isn’t drawing crowds. So some companies have been offering celebrity productions to up the comfort factor. But “pretending that ballet isn’t really ballet, that it’s just an upmarket sister to Strictly Come Dancing, won’t lure any new viewers into the theatre the next time the Kirov dance Balanchine.”

According to a recent study in the Journal of Orthopaedic Sports Physical Therapy, the annual injury rate at classical ballet companies ranges from 67 percent to 95 percent.