Category: dance

After 50 years, and as she nears age 90, the company’s founder is making way for her longtime assistant artistic director, Kim Bears-Bailey, who first joined Philadanco as a dancer in 1981 and calls her boss “Aunt Joan.” But Brown isn’t stepping all the way back just yet: “I’m number 1, Kim is 1B.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

When it comes to the secrets of longevity in a dance career, Linda Austin and Bobby Fouther had similar thoughts: you do what makes you happy, just keep going, and ignore the pressures to be liked. In an interview for a book called Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond,  by Emmaly Wiederhold with photographs by Gregory Bartning, Austin said, “If you are stubborn enough and love it enough, you’ll find a way to keep going. You do need some outside validation from time to time. I’ve always gotten just enough to keep me going but not enough to make me comfortable. The carrot is always just ahead.” – Oregon ArtsWatch

Ballroom dancer Trisha Pérez Kennedy says that “normally, her partner’s touch helps communicate the next step in a dance combination. ‘We use the strength of our bodies to speak to each other,’ she says. ‘It can be as subtle as the pressure of his hand on my back to help me know what will happen next. When you’re dancing on your own, you don’t have that guidance keeping you in check. You have to own all of your technique.'” – Wall Street Journal

The world of mixed martial arts is deeply violent – and Khan, who has been dancing for 30 years, wanted to confront his own fears about violence. He ended up choreographing for the fighters. “Once Khan realised that the spectacle surrounding MMA was just as important as the fight itself, he set about creating a dance-based narrative for Brazier’s walk-on to the cage, merging the controlled violence of both practices.” – The Guardian (UK)

“The choreographies are designed for the functionally diverse artists so that they can demonstrate their artistic qualities. As I create, I physically put myself in their place (wheelchair, etc.), testing and experiencing the choreography. I search for innovative ways someone with restricted movement can achieve the same intention, such as hitting the floor with the wheelchair to create what would be the percussion of footwork. – Dance Magazine

“At the forefront of this growing field is Sydney Skybetter, a former dancer and a professor of what he calls choreographics at Brown University, where his students approach dance in a way that is heavily computational. … By the end of the 20th century, motion capture, wearable tech and virtual reality had arrived on the scene. Then came A.I.” – The New York Times

Catie Cuan, currently working on a mechanical engineering Ph.D. at Stanford: “There are a number of studies that demonstrate that how something moves is even more important [to a user] than how it looks. … I have a set of tools and ethics and practices and skills that I bring to the table, which is ingrained through years of dance training. I can bring those to the application of design, interaction and control mechanisms for robots.” – Dance Magazine

Born in 1970 as a sort of successor to Judson Dance Theater, The Grand Union (named after a supermarket chain) lasted only for six years. Yet the group and (subsequently) its members — among them Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton — changed the course of the art form. Not long ago Wendy Perron came across some old Grand Union videotapes and wondered if the work could be as good as she remembered: “It was even better.” – The New York Times

Christopher D’Addario, who quietly resigned as executive director in March, temporarily shuttered the Greenwich Village school’s website Sept. 16, then threatened more disruptions if he wasn’t paid a hefty $450,000, the school claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit. – New York Post

“The stateless émigrés trained ‘Shanghailanders’ in the early 20th century, including one Margot Fonteyn. Their influence remains embedded in modern Chinese ballet.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)