Category: dance

New York’s Fall for Dance delivers a lot of dance for a tiny price. And it’s been a huge hit with younger audiences. “Whatever its trickle-down effects, the festival has created a rare commodity in New York dance: audience that’s game for anything. ‘If you pay $100, there’s an expectation — that you have the right to get a certain amount of something that you like. If you pay $10, it’s more, ‘Let’s see what we get’.”

“While Mr. Tetley often worked abroad as a freelance choreographer after lack of money obliged him to disband his modern-dance troupe in New York in 1969, his influence has been felt as widely in American dance as among the Europeans and Australians who have encountered his pioneering ideas over the last 50 years.”

“Incongruous as it may seem, ballet was part of the Cuban revolution from its inception. Legend has it that, while Castro was battling the imperialists, he sent Alicia Alonso a message from his hideout in the sierra asking her to form a national ballet company in the event of his victory. When he came to power in 1959, she had no hesitation. ‘I was dancing in Chicago, but I dropped everything and came running’.”

“Go to any ballet house and, however serene the dancers’ faces, those elegant pink silk shoes hide a battery of injuries: black nails, purpling flesh, growths galore. Peter Norman, one of the UK’s leading podiatrists, has seen it all in the 16 years he has been treating the the Royal Ballet. ‘I know of dancers who have gone on pointe with broken bones and stress fractures,’ says Norman. ‘The pressure on them to get parts, to guard their places in the companies, means they push themselves too far.’ Most dance companies now employ physiotherapists, even masseurs, on staff, but dancers’ feet remain areas of private hell.”

Barbara Weisberger, 80, was Balanchine’s first pupil. She’s also the founder of Pennsylvania Ballet. “There are famous stories about Balanchine and his ballerina muses of course, but Ms. Weisberger, with her unusually broad perspective and tenacity, represents something more crucial in a historical sense. As a director she was Balanchine’s protégée, and she has devoted much of her professional life to teaching and promoting regional dance.”

A new publishing entity will publish a combination of dance and cheerleading magazines. “The marriage isn’t as odd as it seems. On the corporate level this would seem to be a complementary merger. All the magazines will continue to appear under their new umbrella, and everyone has been assured of editorial independence, reports Wendy Perron, the editor of Dance Magazine.”

“It was during his thrilling siguiriya at the recently concluded New World Flamenco Festival, that Spain’s Andrés Peña did something I’d never seen at a flamenco concert before: Peña took off his suit jacket and tied it around his waist. … Turns out that Peña had split his pants while dancing,” Laura Bleiberg writes. “He tied the jacket around his waist to hide the rip, I found out a few days after the show. After laughing at the whole thing, I was reminded once again how careful a critic must be about what he or she sees onstage.”

“To me, a ballet is a larger, more complex structure than a dance. When I hear the word ‘dance,’ I automatically think, not good or bad, but of a consistent type of a cliché of girls really sweating it up in certain types of costumes. My work is constant choreography timed really specifically to a sound-score that I write as if it’s music, even if it’s made up of sound effects. We don’t like to see our performers break a sweat, even though it’s hard. It is dance but it’s dance that’s very deceiving because it completely imitates naturalism.”

“Instead of inviting a few companies to perform full programs, this year’s 10th annual festival, which runs Friday-Sept. 10, culls principal dancers from a dizzying number of U.S., European and Latin American companies and features them in a near-marathon of bravura solos and pas de deux from Don Quixote to Swan Lake.”

The company has made an agreement with musicians that will provide live orchestral accompaniment for the dance company’s first three productions in the upcoming season. “Last season, a decision to eliminate live accompaniment for performances of “Cinderella” resulted in an increased commitment by both sides to avoid such cut-backs in the future.”