Category: dance

“If you stay in a show, you get a percentage rise every year, that’s what they do. They give you so much for staying a second year or third year. But as dancers get older and older, every time they go to a new show, they start off at square one again. It is quite hard for them. There does not seem to be any provision for experienced dancers as they get older.”

In the three decades since Deuce Coupe Twyla Tharp has “created and dissolved several incarnations of her own company, made pieces for ballet companies and ice skaters, worked in theater, film and television, written books and choreographed and directed on Broadway. Her impulses seem to be to diversify and conquer — and often she does.”

Minneapolis’s Shubert Theater has been on the restoration list for nearly a decade, but it still sits empty and run-down, waiting to become the regional dance hub that has been promised for so long. Now, the renovation plans are changing yet again. “The anticipated cost of the renovation is now $41 million, up from $37 million two years ago… And if everything goes as planned, the Shubert’s doors will open in January, 2010.”

Alexei Ratmansky “has created close to 40 ballets. His choreography and his musical choices are enmeshed like a pair of courting skylarks. His dances are often witty, unpretentious and technically accomplished, but rarely fussy. He comes from a tradition in which even ballet is expected to have something to say whether the subject is love, class, power, the genius of Comrade Stalin, the fleetingness of life or the importance of celebrating beauty for its own sake. Dancers in his ballets move as if they were ravenous for space.”

“Many ballet memoirs revel in a sort of martyrdom in service to a calling. In “No Way Home” we see a man who spent years in blunt defiance of his calling. The result is a bittersweet, uneven but spirited testament to Acosta’s prodigious talent: despite it all, when he finally leapt, he flew.”

“Now close to 90, Irina Baronova retired from the stage in the mid-1940s. But she stepped onto Adelaide’s Festival Theatre stage on Saturday with all the aplomb of the ballerina she once was.”

“David Bowie has denied reports he has given permission for his songs to be used in a stage show inspired by his 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth. His statement follows claims in the Sun newspaper he was collaborating with the Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss.”

“One venerable dance critic has sniffed at Matthew Bourne’s habit of ‘turning some of ballet’s older masterpieces upside-down and shaking them to see what falls out of their pockets’. Others consider him not so much a choreographer as a showy producer. Bourne doesn’t care and neither do audiences.”

Planning a wedding is always a complex undertaking. There are flowers to be ordered, the vows to be written, the choreographer to be hired… yes, we said choreographer. “For contemporary choreographers and dancers… as well as nondancers savvy enough to employ an atypical professional service, the traditional first dance is anything but.”

“I feel like the first circle has been completed. We’ve started to change the company, and we’ve completed the circle. Now it’s time for round two.”