Category: dance

Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet finishes its first season of a new era under director Peter Boal. Portland’s Oregon Ballet picks up some of PNB’s DNA with its director Christopher Stowell, son of former PNB directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell…

“When Caitlin Corbett’s new duet ‘Yield’ was subject to a last-minute costume overhaul at the Boston University dance theatre last month so that dancer Nicole Pierce wouldn’t dance topless, the heavy-handed puritanism of the regulation exactly proved the choreographer’s point: our culture is so hypersexualized that we never get a chance to consider female anatomy in a neutral way.” So what are Boston’s regulations about nudity onstage? Turns out it’s complicated…

A performer in “Movin’ Out” is fired, because, she alleges, her breasts got too big. “The dance world doesn’t necessarily view such firing decisions as hypocritical; they are merely business as usual. The Body Police enforce specifications that have nothing to do with the ability to perform. Some women have resorted to breast reduction to conform with the slim standards of ballet.

It’s the time of year when young dancers at the New York-based School of American Ballet find out whether they have been chosen to serve as apprentice members of New York City Ballet, and the competition is fierce, with good reason. “Every year 6 to 10 advanced dancers from the school join the company as apprentices, enjoying essentially a trial run. Almost all stay on as permanent members. In fact, the ballet company draws an overwhelming number of its dancers from its school — 90 of the current 97.”

The PushPULL Dance Company is made up of dancers who have other careers going. “We didn’t become professional dancers because we have multiple interests that have to be satisfied, and the name PushPULL underscores just how torn we are between the love of the arts and our day to day jobs. If you love dance, but you also love science or math or languages or the law — it’s hard to do these on the side. That’s why dance became the hobby, and in my case, engineering became the career. Once the decision had been made, there is also the benefit of knowing you’re going to get the higher paycheque.”

Star “ballerina Sylvie Guillem has been appointed associate artist at Sadler’s Wells by artistic director and chief executive Alistair Spalding. The dancer has been a guest principal at the Royal Ballet since 1988 and has appeared with companies such as the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov and La Scala.”

“If you assume that flamenco is all phony histrionics, you’ve probably never seen Soledad Barrio in action. Her performances start with a quiet, silky grace, but by the end she is more creature than human.”

Henry Perkins is only the second British boy in the Bolshoi Ballet’s 230-year history to have been accepted into the prestigious school…

“By all accounts Jerome Robbins was a complicated, sometimes joyful, sometimes tortured, often angry man, so it is no surprise that his reputation remains complex. At his best, at least, Robbins managed to bend classical dancers and steps to his purposes. However uneven his ballets may have been — and Balanchine had some clunkers too — there are those of us who remain deeply moved by Robbins’s greatest late ballets: those made after he had rejoined the City Ballet fold in 1969, the prodigal son, and was working in a largely classical idiom with Balanchine-trained dancers.”

Everyone’s been talking about American Ballet Theatre’s spectacular male dances. But Gillian Murphy offers a new model for a woman dancer, writes Apollinaire Sherr.