Category: dance

“If there were just one problem, there might be one clear solution. But lengthy interviews with more than a dozen people, including Deputy Mayor Dave Lieberth, who conducted a comprehensive study of the company, revealed a quilt of overlapping reasons, the kind faced by dance companies across the country.”

“Having seen dance blossom in the past 30 years increases the sadness we feel at seeing it enter a less dynamic phase. Potential for new adventures is greatly diminished in these cash-strapped times. The exciting new undergrowth has never been sparser and old growth (we consider the Sydney Dance Company as such) has never been more threatened.”

Big Dance week is a UK-wide project to encourage everyone to get up on the floor. And it accomplishes…

Yuri Possokhov was a star dancer with San Francisco Ballet. But as he retires from dancing, he’s named the company’s resident choreographer. A brilliant second career awaits…

The American Dance Festival is 73 years old. It’s had the same director for 38 years. “It remains one of the two premier summer dance festivals in the United States, the other being Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires. And it has long since broadened its scope to embrace modern — or contemporary, or nonballetic — dance from around the world.”

American Ballet Theatre’s season at the Metropolitan Opera House is a crowd pleaser. “Whether it or any company could be great and grand enough to fill the 3,900-seat Metropolitan Opera House consistently on the highest artistic level week after week is another matter. Ballet Theater needs the Met to certify its grandeur; the Met needs Ballet Theater to plug a two-month hole in its schedule with a lucrative rental. The match is not ideal.”

“The first black principal of the Royal Ballet, Carlos Acosta was adamant about not being typecast. He has been a pioneer in the extension of colour-blind casting from opera to classical ballet. ‘The fact that I’m the first black Romeo – and I make people forget it – is a big achievement,’ he says. ‘If they’d judged me for my looks, and put me in a box, the world would never have seen the Romeo that lies beneath me … In New York there are black dancers and their aspirations are constantly killed.’ Yet in his view, recruitment of black people into classical ballet, as opposed to contemporary dance, remains a problem.”

Svetlana Zakharova is the Bolshoi Ballet’s reigning star. “In the flesh, it’s hard not to be a little dazzled by Zakharova’s improbably fine features and impossibly big blue eyes – but these are merely the finishing touches of a long, strong, beautifully proportioned body that’s one of the great balletic instruments of our times. On stage, such is her athleticism and purity of line, that one doubts she has ever found anything difficult. Is this true?”

Rich and Tone Talauega are “two of the most sought-after choreographers for television commercials, which makes them two of the most important and influential choreographers in the world: in the course of just 30 seconds, their work will reach millions of people, far more than ever see even the most successful theatrical dance production. And for their labors they’re paid far more than a theatrical production could manage: upwards of $3,000 a day.”

One of America’s foremost dance educators and the founder of the Washington School of Ballet has died aged 96. “Mary Day identified and developed so much world-class talent at the ballet school that her former students dance in virtually every sizable company in the nation.”