Category: dance

A year ago, San Diego’s Dance Alliance was flying high. Now the 26-year-old organization is in ruins. “The Dance Alliance’s downfall seems to be paved with the good intentions of people who shared a love for dance; friends who trusted one another.”

“When the Mark Morris Dance Group takes the stage before live cameras Thursday in the internationally acclaimed “Mozart Dances,” 5 million viewers – as many as watch “America’s Next Top Model” each week – will tune in to see the dance. How does “Live From Lincoln Center” pull it off?”

“South Korea is at the forefront of the new wave of break-dance, or b-boy, artistry, but dancers from France to China are also incorporating elements of jazz, capoeira, acrobatics and martial arts into longer choreographed works that are intended for a mainstream audience and the legitimacy of a proscenium stage. Though still largely unknown, this new generation has reinvented a movement style that in many ways had been exploited and dismissed.”

“Recently there’s been some controversy about tap festivals, ever since Savion Glover told a New York Times reporter in June that they were ‘impersonal and business-oriented.’ But the charge does not seem to apply in L.A.,” where the inclusive Los Angeles Tap Festival turns 5 this year.

“The Bolshoi may have toned down the black face paint for what can only be described as the ‘golliwog’ dancers in its current staging of La Bayadère, but is it time to get rid of them entirely? For those who haven’t seen or have blanked all memory of these exotic cuties, they are the eight little girls who are deployed as ‘native’ fan bearers in the first two acts of the ballet, and who are periodically let loose in capering, flat-footed dances that barely stop short of them scratching under their armpits. … If we find them difficult to stomach, however, what do we want to happen?”

The annual residency by New York City Ballet at upstate New York’s Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) made more money this year than last. But attendance was down 10%, and “compared to 2005, the most recent year in which the ballet gave 21 performances, attendance this summer was down by 21 percent.”

“Movies that incorporate or revolve around social dance are distinctly of their own time. And without movies to show how people danced at a given moment in history, the style of that era would exist only in photography and memory.”

New York is America’s largest dance center, with 4000-5000 dancers in the city and 1,200 “dance entities”. So what does the New York dance scene look like from the ground? Bob Yesselman, director of Dance/NYC gives a peek…

It wasn’t so long ago that the Bolshoi Ballet was in difficulty. “To the relief of ballet lovers worldwide, the Bolshoi has refused to disappear. And thanks to a dramatic infusion of money from newly wealthy Russians and foreign well-wishers, it has probably never been in better financial health.”

“Boris Yeltsin will be remembered by some for his erratic, drink-induced behaviour. To the Bolshoi, however, ‘Tsar’ Boris was the hero who saved the company from the uncertainties of privati sation. ‘During the 1990s, there were those who fought to turn the Bolshoi into a corporation. It was Yeltsin who created the special law to protect our theatre as a national treasure; and it was under him that the £400m reconstruction began’.”