Category: dance

So Savion Glover was central to the success of the animated “Happy Feet.” But John Rockwell wonders why he doesn’t get higher credit in the film. “I wasn’t at the ‘Happy Feet’ negotiating table, so I can hardly impugn the tactics or skill of Mr. Glover and his negotiators in these matters. Maybe they gave way on credit placement in exchange for more money. But for an admirer of him and of tap and of dance, he seems to have gotten a ludicrously raw deal.”

“Most of the downtown choreographers (who generally loathe that label) have long since fled Manhattan for affordable housing and rehearsal space in Brooklyn or one of New York City’s other boroughs.”

“It is hard to exaggerate the success and cultural influence of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. It has now been on the road, off and on, for 11 years (it is currently running at Sadler’s Wells, London, until January 21), meaning that more people have seen his darkly homoerotic version than have the Royal Ballet’s, ever.”

“Like her passion for dance, Laura Jacobs’s writing is immoderate. A sentence may begin with a lovely image, embroider it three times, and make a sudden leap to a related (but distant) idea. To read these essays is to tag along on the free-associative jaunts of a quick thinker.”

To what extent should a dance company should market its stars? “How much should the company leadership single out individual performers, cast them in leading roles and plaster their pictures all over advertising? Is this just common sense, the audience having always been lured by stars, or is it unfair to other fine performers and destructive to company morale?”

“Ron Guidi and the company were one and the same until his retirement in 1998, after which things began to fall apart, for a variety of reasons, and Oakland Ballet officially died. Last year, Guidi purchased the entire treasure trove of costumes and sets from the company he founded in 1965, raised the money to hire dancers, musicians from the Oakland East Bay Symphony and rent the Paramount, and even found a corporate sponsor, Chevron, which offered to help fill the house with hundreds of local families.”

The New York City Ballet spends $500,000 a year on about 9,000 shoes. The pointe shoes for NYCB and many other companies are hand-made by workers at Freed. But in recent years many of the company’s master craftsmen have retired, and dancers notice the difference…

“The biennial Monaco Dance Forum, held in the exclusive European principality, focuses on a low-profit performing art and is conducted largely in French. But the young festival is broader in scope than prominent performance-oriented gatherings such as the American Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow, and focuses squarely on what it perceives as the brave frontiers of dance creation and presentation.”

“He emerged from the debris of downtown: from the disco life, the artists, from that dark underside of the city. And he very much gives you the impression of New York in the ’80s: the nightclub world, with its kind of simple but open, tender sexuality.”

“Tradition is a thorny word in the tiny, fractious world of tap; unlike in modern dance, with its quest for the new, tap elders cast a grand shadow, and respect for the past is a powerful force…. While younger dancers hasten to stress this respect, some acknowledge impatience with the status quo, from lineup-style shows to a dependency on the festival circuit, which has played a crucial role in revitalizing tap.” And tappers in their 20s and 30s are moving from impatience to action.