Category: dance

Creating a historical record of dance is one of the greatest challenges in the arts world, but a few dedicated souls are stepping up to the task. “Dance archives are not just a librarian’s or a historian’s resource. Dance companies and choreographers rely on a lot of these materials to reconstruct dances of the past. Traditionally, ballet has always been passed on anecdotally, from dancer to dancer. Modern dance has only recently been documented.”

The Trockaderos have enthusiastic audiences in the US and UK. But “even when audiences know and love the Trocks, different countries look for different things, and react in different ways. London and New York are the easiest audiences, spanning gay and straight punters, dedicated dance fans and ordinary theatre-goers; among them all, every joke and nuance gets appreciated. In dance-obsessed Japan, however, where the group are a national cult, enthusiasm is much more muted.”

Tobi Tobias surveys the art of dancers writing about dance, and finds quite a bit. “Why, then, have dancers have been considered functionally illiterate, inarticulate, or both?”

Sid Smith hails this season’s dance offerings in Chicago as “the most exciting autumn in dance” in the city in a “quarter of a century.”

“The School of American Ballet is the closest thing that the United States has to a national dance academy. Founded in 1934 by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein as a training ground for what would become New York City Ballet, it is as rigorous as the Paris Opera Ballet School, the Royal Ballet School in London and its own most direct ancestor: the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, where Balanchine trained. Of the 304 dancers, ages 7 to 18, who auditioned this year, only 68 earned spots.”

“Two months after Graeme Murphy and his wife, Janet Vernon, announced their resignation as artistic director and associate artistic director, the company remains in a perilous financial position, and is pinning its hopes on the Australia Council’s major performing arts companies funding model review.”

Dance superstar Sylvie Guillem is moving in yet another direction. “During the past five years, however, Guillem has finally been able to push her career in a radical new direction, turning the page on tutu roles and working with choreographers from modern dance.”

“If you asked a New York ballet dancer to name the teacher of the moment, Azari Plisetski would probably not spring to mind. But Mikhail Baryshnikov would like to change that. A major admirer of Mr. Plisetski, 69, who is widely credited with rejuvenating Cuban ballet in the 1960’s and bringing Cuban male dancers to the fore internationally, Mr. Baryshnikov invited Mr. Plisetski to teach professional classes this week at his [Manhattan] studios.”

Having made a success of programming contemporary music, Columbia University’s George Steel is taking on dance for Miller Theatre. “At a time when things are looking bad around the country, and audiences are diminishing, and things are boring, it’s time for New York to step forward. There have been suggestions that New York is lagging behind, and we need to change that. You hear talk that New York institutions are a little shy. No, no, no. That’s not the way we do things around here.”

The Biennale de la Danse in Lyon has become one of the world’s great dance festivals. “Every installment of the festival has a theme, often geographic and intended to minimize the impression of a lively grab bag of the most interesting stuff available that year. This year’s 28 cities — 29, until Cairo had to cancel for technical reasons — are supposed collectively to represent dance and the city.”