Category: dance

“A recent Arts Council report cited contemporary dance as the fastest-growing art form in Britain, but even so few could have predicted the scale of the response to Alistair Spalding’s most popular seasons – of flamenco, hip-hop or Brazilian dance. By the end of his first year, audience figures were up by 40 per cent, and this year is likely to see a similar sort of increase.”

What do most people want to see on TV? Turns out it’s dancing. As in “Dancing with the Star.” “Now regularly drawing some 20 million fans to each of its twice-weekly broadcasts, ‘Dancing With the Stars’ has turned into the second-most-popular reality show, ranking behind only American Idol.”

“During the mid-to-late 1970s, women on the cutting edge of choreography tended to hold equivalently radical views with regard to body hair, and a quite remarkable number of reviews from that period featured outraged references to unshaven armpits, coupled with wistful asides about the immaculate grooming standards upheld in ballet. Times and fashions change, along with political correctness. But hair does still mark a profound divide between ballet and modern dance – even if the focus has shifted from the women to the men, and from the body to the scalp.”

“We’ve let movement description dominate our reviews for too long,” writes Apollinaire Sher. “You know, ‘Miriam Morningflower lifts her leg, whirls, climbs on her partner’s back.’ We show and show and show, when we ought to mainly tell.”

New York’s Radio City Christmas Spectacular has a new choreographer this year: Linda Haberman, the first woman to hold the job in the history of the long-running holiday show. “Her plan — a noble one to those who revere the dying art of precision dance — is to save the Rockettes from mediocrity… Ms. Haberman is creating choreography for them that is both deceivingly difficult and wholly glamorous. Yes, the eye-high kicks are still around, but she is actually giving the Rockettes something sophisticated to dance. And it’s clear that they worship at her finely arched feet.”

Wilma Salisbury has been writing about the arts in Cleveland since 1968, and she has seen various arts organizations thrive there, even as the city as a whole struggled. But when it comes to dance, Cleveland has always been lacking. “When the economy faltered, dance ensembles were the first to feel the pinch… Where are the funders? How committed are the presenters? Is it possible to grow a larger audience for dance in Northeast Ohio?”

“The Sleeping Beauty is the jewel in the classical crown of the National Ballet of Canada. It has been 34 years, and hundreds of performances, since Rudolf Nureyev first crafted this sumptuous production for the company.” Now, the production is getting a complete overhaul, with the staging at the company’s new Toronto home “reawakened, brushed up and refreshed to the tune of $700,000 — nearly twice the amount originally budgeted to stage it.”

When choreographer Michael Clark “recently asked his friends in the art world to donate pieces to a fundraising auction for his troupe, the resulting sale brought it something close to £1 million.”

“Together they are a band of 10 women and 15 men from varied religious backgrounds. Once they toured the world together. Today they are simply trying to survive, hoping one day to thrive again as a troupe. But the religiosity sweeping Iraq does not bode well for their future.”

Washington DC’s dance scene is undergoing a renovation, with “an expansion of studio and performance spaces taking root amid a real estate boom that’s transforming Washington — and transforming the arts scene. The theater community is already undergoing a facelift, with several new facilities open or under construction. Dance leaders may have come late to the party, with some spaces still in the planning stages, but starting this season, and especially in years to come, audiences will see fundamental changes.”