Category: dance

“For me, this is just part of the natural evolution of this company. Mr. Ailey told us that you must always turn around and look to see who is behind you so you can help them. Meaning, remember that there was someone who looked behind them and grabbed your hand and helped you. So we put our feet on the ground and come to understand who we are as human beings, and then we must turn around and help the next person.”

“For Los Angeles itself, this is a particularly damaging time to lose its best-known critic. The city has just seen the launch of the Los Angeles Ballet, after two seasons still feeling its way in terms of audience and repertory. It deserves and requires the attention of at least one well-informed, local critic to judge and observe its progress on a regular basis.”

“My business attire is a pair of tights. All right, there it is. I wear makeup onstage, and some of my colleagues are gay. Can we move on now? Can we leave behind the tired male-ballet-dancer stigma–that ballet is not a masculine pursuit–in order to move toward an appreciation of the athleticism and artistry involved in this line of work?”

“With Judith Jamison’s announcement last month that she plans to retire as artistic director [of Alvi Ailey American Dance Theater] by 2011, the question for the company is who can possibly succeed her?”

“Although the sizable deficit and the grim overall financial situation that threatened the organization in 2004 have diminished substantially, no one will be seeing the professional company in the near future. Instead, DTH is conducting a 10-city audition tour devoted solely to the intensive student summer program at its spacious Harlem headquarters, which continues to hum with activity.”

Police chiefs in Romania “have sent their officers to ballet classes in the hope of helping them to manage the traffic with more grace and ease, and to encourage a reduction in road rage.”

The Los Angeles Times has told dance critic Lewis Segal that his position is being eliminated. “I have followed my supervisors’ advice and applied for the Times buyout, which means I’ll be off the staff as of the end of this month. However, there is some talk about my freelancing for the paper in the future.”

“There’s a new school of hip-hop dance that is evolving beyond ’80s-style break dancing or the moves you see on MTV. It’s new enough that it has yet to form a solid identity. Another difference is diversity. What used to be a primarily an urban art form has jumped to places like Orange County, particularly among Asian Americans.”

Yuri Burlaka, a choreographer known for reconstructing classic ballets, has been appointed as the successor to Alexei Ratmansky as the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet.

“Dance (let’s not restrict it to ballet, it’ll only encourage the sniggering at the back) is something we seriously lack in our lives. We should have more of it. No, not more professional dancers (I already see enough dance, and sometimes actively wish there was less of it). I mean we should do more of it in general.”