Category: dance

“Forty-two years after founding the Oakland Ballet, 20 years after raising it to unlikely international repute, nine years after suddenly retiring, and seven years after watching his beloved creation begin a steady slide toward death, Ronn Guidi is bringing the Oakland Ballet back… The new Oakland Ballet Company will give its inaugural performance at the Paramount Theatre on Oct. 20.”

Stephen Greco is the new director of New York’s Dance Theatre Workshop. So what’s it going to look like under his direction?

“The dramatisation of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes has only just been announced, but speculation is already rising as to whether it will galvanise a new generation of hopeful ballerinas and recreate the much-vaunted Billy Elliot effect for girls.”

“The organisers of a major dance festival in Warwickshire have said they are confident it will go ahead this weekend, despite the recent floods. More than 50,000 people are expected to pile into the Long Marston airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon for the Global Gathering event from Friday.”

A dancer in Streb Extreme Action — “a company that mixes kinetic daredevilry, stunts and modern dance” — breaks her back, and another company member puts out a call for a fundraiser to help. That company member is later fired, and now he’s contesting the firing.

Architect Zaha Hadid is collaborating on a piece of dance at the Lincoln Center Festival: “What’s interesting about dance is that there isn’t a single linear path through the stage. There’s always overlap and interplay. If you look at the movement in dance, you see that dancers occupy the space differently at every single moment. They occupy the stage in different ways.”

“Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt, aka the Ballet Boyz, have done for classical and contemporary dance what Strictly Come Dancing has done for ballroom: got it on television, unpicked some of its complexity, and made it seem a lot less weird.

Spain’s flamenco performers are fighting one another. “Though flamenco is a relatively ‘young’ art, which people only started to pay to see about 160 years ago, arguments about the ‘purity’ of the form are endless and typically stormy. On one side are the fundamentalists, or puris-tas, who admit no diversion from the path of what they see as the true faith. For them, those who mix flamenco with other forms, such as classical ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, or even pop, have diluted the art into a pastiche of the original only worthy of the tablaos, or tourist shows.”

“There is something essentially postmodern, in the best sense, about ‘Slow Dancing.’ It is all about the transfiguration of the commonplace, to reapply a phrase made famous by the art critic Arthur Danto. Though there is nothing exactly common about a prima ballerina airborne in the midst of a jeté, nevertheless, an unmistakable transfiguration occurs when that same dancer is reduced to silence, slowed to an almost mortuary stillness, and blown up to the size of a colossus.”

“At 54, Kirkland needs mime skills for her ballet comeback, but her role as the wicked fairy Carabosse in this unorthodox ‘Sleeping Beauty’ also involves being the centerpiece of complex lifts and, for a time, even some aerial maneuvers — though those have been deleted from the production since the New York run. No, she’s never done wire work before, or been a choreographer, for that matter, but she’s also never been afraid of a new challenge — and playing someone she calls “a woman who is beautiful on the outside but evil on the inside” is definitely that.”