Category: dance

New York City Ballet has promoted nine dancers to soloist. “The promotions, announced last week, suggest that this is a significant time of growth at the middle level of the company.”

Two years ago, Liverpool dance schools got a big boost when Strictly Come Dancing landed on TV. But the new recruits were girls rather than boys. Now they’re looking for some girls. “Out of 84 students, we have only got 18 male students and they are getting a bit worn out dancing and lifting all the girls. They are very macho boys but there just aren’t enough of them to go round.”

Mark Morris is celebrating his company’s 25th anniversary this year. Tere O’Connor and Susan Marshall are celebrating 20th anniversaries. “Together with Morris, they possess the force of a movement. But with all the bickering, no one has noticed. And modern dance’s health depends on people noticing. Without an acknowledged history, an art form has little chance of a robust future.”

Three years ago Scottish ballet was in disarray. The company was being moved forcibly from being a traditional company to going modern. Then Ashley Page came along. “The former Royal Ballet principal dancer and acclaimed postmodern choreographer took up the reins there just over three years ago. Since then, armed with the expertise gleaned over his 27 years with the Royal, and energy reserves worthy of Kazakhstan, he has not only created two full-length works for the company (Nutcracker and Cinderella, the latter of which he’s also taking south): he has turned it almost completely around.”

“With the world premiere Thursday of ‘Up and Down’ by Mark Morris, the Boston Ballet celebrates an important milestone in its relationship with the renowned choreographer — one that it could not have reached a few years ago, before artistic director Mikko Nissinen came to town.” Specifically, the company believes it has completed its comeback, and is again ready to rank with the top ballets in the country. The always-outspoken Morris appears to agree.

Where does dance end and theater begin? And does it actually matter? John Rockwell has been sampling some of the UK’s wide-ranging dance scene recently, and “from an outsider’s perspective, it was surprising how ubiquitous ‘physical theater’ is in Britain today. The term means, in the most rudimentary terms, theatrical dance, or dance with implied theatrical elements, or theater expressed primarily through movement… But nearly all British choreographers seem to incorporate overt theatricality, sometimes so much so that they try to pretend that they aren’t doing dance anymore at all.”

The job of ballet conductor is far more than a simple stick-waving exercise. Synchronizing music and dance is a tremendously difficult undertaking, and it takes a cool head and a keen eye to adjust an entire orchestra to the sometimes unpredictable whims of the performers on stage. So it was a bit of a surprise when San Francisco Ballet tapped an unusually young man to be its new pit conductor, but 37-year-old Martin West loves a challenge, and initial reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.

A writer proposes writing about an up and coming dance company for Dance Europe magazine, but says she is told that for political reasons the publication doesn’t review Israeli artists…

“The Joffrey Ballet and the City of Chicago are teaming up for ‘Come Dance With Us,’ a week of free events in Millennium Park this summer as part of the troupe’s 50th anniversary celebration. The free events, to be held June 13-18, include a Joffrey performance at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, two outdoor concerts with the Grant Park Orchestra at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a bootdance spectacle in the outdoor Crown Fountain involving more than a dozen high school students, a parade of characters from ‘The Nutcracker’ and a late-night dance lesson to live music.”

Microsoft is showing off a computer interface that is controlled by dancing in front of it. “The dance pad has designated arrows and buttons that are normally used to correspond to beats in the game, but for Microsofts system it will be used to navigate and scroll through a wide variety of applications.”