Category: dance

San Diego has a new home for dance. “Dance Place San Diego opened in December at NTC Promenade. Moving into the 23,000-square-foot, 11-studio building were three resident dance troupes – Malashock Dance, Jean Isaacs’ San Diego Dance Theater and San Diego Ballet – as well as San Diego Actors’ Alliance and a wellness practice.” But financial challenges abound…

Ivan Vasiliev is only 17 but he’s already being hailed as the world’s next superstar dancer. “He has the makings of the dazzling male figurehead, the natural Spartacus that Moscow has been short of for two decades. The baby of the company is not remotely intimidated by this.”

A ballet commemorating the tenth anniversary of the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace is set to premiere in Milan. “Thanks Gianni, With Love has been put together by French choreographer Maurice Bejart, for whom Versace designed many stage costumes. About 1,500 guests, including Versace’s favourite models, are due to attend the show at the La Scala opera house.”

The tine Aspen Santa Fe Ballet has done well in its 11 years. But “we have reached a point where we have maxed out all of our potential income. We tour. We did 35 or 38 cities this year by the time we finished. So the touring income is maximized. With 10 dancers, we could not be touring anymore. Any little girl who wants to take dance in the valley is already enrolled in our school. So the school is maxed out. Everybody who wants to see dance – we have a big enough theater and we do multiple nights. So, our audience is really not growing. The only way for us to sustain or improve what we do is the extra cash coming from investments-endowment. It’s the only way forward.”

Greece doesn’t immediately spring to mind when you think of modern dance. But “a 2005 report found more than 60 registered contemporary dance companies and many more independent choreographers. And there also seems to be an enthusiastic public for this kind of work, if the full houses and animated reactions seen over the last few days at the Athens Epidaurus Festival are anything to go by.”

“British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is to take to the stage for the first time in the UK in almost a decade. Seven years after he announced his retirement as a dancer to concentrate on choreography, he will perform a four-minute solo at the Ballet for the People gala at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday and Sunday.”

Fox’s formulaic TV competition, “So You Think You Can Dance” isn’t really about serious dance, any more than American Idol is about serious singing. But this season, a real dancer (Danny Tidwell from American Ballet Theater) has joined the ranks of So You Think’s contestants. The result? At least one judge hates him, he’s perceived as arrogant because he actually knows what he’s doing and won’t mug for the camera, and he was nearly voted off by the audience last week.

“We need to go back to the era of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, when choreographers worked with designers and great musicians to create masterpieces. If people stop having visions, ballet will not evolve.”

The Ballet Boyz – Michael Nunn and William Trevitt – “have achieved something few would have thought possible when they started out in 2001: they have created a dance culture for the Radiohead generation. ‘We want as many people to come and see our shows as possible. But telling people that we’re serious artists probably isn’t the way to do that. We’d rather say look, we’re ordinary blokes, it’s just that we go on stage and do this extraordinary thing’.”

“The effect of seeing human faces and bodies in crystalline extreme slow motion has been revelatory, to dancers and nondancers alike. Until now, David Michalek said, this technology — still in the prototype phase — has been used primarily for applications like military ballistics tests and car-crash simulations. Now, in ‘Slow Dancing,’ slow-motion high definition is being harnessed to show things as minute as the trajectory of a flyaway strand of hair or the progression of a gesture through a hand, finger by finger.”