Category: dance

West Virginia is trying to fight an obesity problem with a popular video game “that uses ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ to boost students’ physical activity. All of the state’s 157 middle schools are expecting to get the video game, and officials hope to put it in all 753 public schools within three years. A pilot project began in 20 schools last spring.”

Ballet Florida, the West Palm Beach-based dance company, “has been searching for ways to expand its reach beyond West Palm Beach, where it has 500 students in its academy. So it has taken up residence in a high school, with a company instructor teaching dance every day at the high school.

It’s been a tumultuous year for Colorado Ballet. One thing that has gone right? The box office. “With nearly a third of its 2005-06 performances remaining, the company has sold more tickets than it did during the entire 2004-05 season and reached 93 percent of its $3.2 million ticket sales goal for 2005-06.”

“Modern dance would seem suited to rock: ordinary people, everyday clothes, ordinary families, movements that embrace myriad social dances that the music spawned. Yet curiously, it was ballet that provided the first major forum for rock…”

“Now 38 years old, in her 20th year at the New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan has attained that rare high plane of soul-and-body synchrony where command of technique serves the spirit of a performer with something to say. Often in ballet the soul begins to wax only as the body starts to wane, and many dancers ready to converse with God find they are physically unable to keep from mumbling. But Whelan has mastered the archetypal ballet themes of Beauty, Time and Death while still in her prime.”

“Flamenco is born more in the singing, and in the playing of guitar. The dancing comes later. There are the basic palos – alegrías, tangos, siguerillas and so on – and from there you can have a very wide map, like a river.”

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has reached an agreement with its 47 musicians to restore some live music to its performances for the 2006-07 season. PBT laid off its orchestra last summer and has been using recorded music this season – the musicians filed an unfair labor practices complaint in retaliation. “PBT leaders have promised to hire the musicians for two of the company’s five productions during its 2006-07 season, which will be announced in two weeks.”

“By now there are Japanese ballet dancers and Japanese tap dancers and Japanese ballroom dancers. Perhaps there soon won’t be, or there already isn’t, a viable category of ‘Japanese dance’ that can be described and categorized; perhaps all that will be left will be globalized individuals.”

Mozart is not the first composer you think of when you think dancing. Mark Morris disagrees: “When I hear Mozart I do hear dance. I maintain that Baroque and early Classical music is almost all dance rhythms. What’s more of a dance than Così fan tutte? Is it easy to choreograph to? That’s the reason I didn’t do much of it when I was young: it seemed too simple. Why bother, you think, the music is square, in straight eights, it’s repeating. But it’s not!”

At London’s Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards: Thomas Lund, principal dancer at the Royal Danish Ballet won best male dancer at the ceremony on Thursday, while best female dancer went to Argentinean star Marianela Nunez.