Category: dance

John Lowe is a former teacher and has been sturying ballet for nine years. “It’s a wonderful feeling. I had always wanted to dance and it proves it’s never too late to learn. I see these people crawling around, hunched over smoking a cigarette – they should be doing ballet.” He will be appearing with the Lantern Dance Theatre Company at The Maltings in Ely tomorrow.

A New Brunswick charitable foundation has pledged $125,000 to professional touring dance company Atlantic Ballet Theatre.

“Ernestine Stodelle, a pioneering modern dancer who performed with Doris Humphrey and José Limón and also wrote about dance, died on Saturday in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 95.”

A Colorao dance company uses YouTube video submissions for a choreography competition. “The goal is that it will get people curious enough to go to the theater, because there’s no replacing live performance. It’s amazing how many people in the world have never gone to the theater or seen a live performance. It’s important to see how different that really feels.”

“The use of taped music in the 20th Century helped popularize dance by saving costs. But there’s an imbalance, a vacuum, a sense of something missing. Take away live music, and you take away part of the thrill.” But in Chicago, something of a live music revival is underway in the city’s prestigious dance scene.

“When commercial DVD producers don’t provide performances by the current crop of bravura dancers or the rep buzzed about on every blog, dance fans now have the means as well as the incentive to do it themselves, posting their footage on YouTube or circulating their shoots via homemade DVDs.”

Marie-Jeanne, an American ballerina long associated with George Balanchine and a member of the New York City Ballet during its first season, died on Friday in Austin, Tex.

“USA Dance, a national nonprofit group devoted to getting ballroom dance into the Olympics, reports a 30 percent increase in its membership since the debut of “Dancing With the Stars” five seasons ago. There are about 200 USA Dance chapters across the United States, and on any given weekend those chapters have about 23,000 dues-paying members hoofing it on dance floors.”

Dancers and choreographers have been using the internet to full advantage in recent months. “Now artists are using the medium as a way not just to build awareness for their work but also to change the nature of the form.”

“This season Clifton Brown, now 27, has emerged as one of the most gifted members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, standing out for his quietly powerful virtuoso technique and the lyrical grace and translucent inwardness of his performances… He began a career as a stealth performer, a dancer who has the goods but moves slowly up the ranks and into the audience’s consciousness.”