Category: dance

“The real estate market has been devastating to many Manhattan dance organizations. From January 1999 to January 2001, at least nine dance studios in Manhattan closed or moved. Others have vanished since. Dance in Brooklyn, meanwhile, has experienced steady growth. New performance spaces, both formal and informal, are flourishing. The borough teems with dancers, and rehearsal space can be found for the shockingly low price of $5 an hour.”

“Gray and bespectacled, hobbling from knee surgery, Jones is still one of the most dashingly charismatic figures in the dance world. But he admits that 20 years of developing new works while trying to maintain a repertory in a competitive marketplace have been exhausting. As he settles into the next decade of artistic life, he is taking stock and looking for new avenues of expression. He is toying with the idea of augmenting the company with actors, singers, and laypeople from the community.”

Royal Winnipeg star Evelyn Hart has retired from the company after 30 years. “Hart, who turns 49 on April 6, said that over the past few years, the company has mounted more and more productions without her. Although billed as one of the company’s principal dancers, she was scheduled to dance only one short pas de deux this season and was not cast in any of the company’s recent hit productions.”

“This is ridiculous. Theatrical dance, throughout its history, has swung back and forth between storytelling and abstraction. For every Marius Petipa there was a Michel Fokine, for every Balanchine an Agnes de Mille, insisting that movement had to “mean” something. In the end, it never mattered. Narrative or abstract, some dance shows were good, and some weren’t. But Matthew Bourne, for his own reasons, has revived this weary debate. He comes, as he has put it, from “Cockney East London,” so he presumably has some feelings about social class. Furthermore, he didn’t see his first ballet until he was nineteen, and didn’t take his first dance lesson till he was twenty-two, so he may, in the past, have had misgivings about his credentials.”

The onstage chemistry shared by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev was unlike anything the dance world had seen before, and the magic they created together has, arguably, never been equaled. But a new biography and its soon-to-be-made companion film assert that they weren’t only partners onstage. But wait, you ask, wasn’t Nureyev gay? Well… yes. Sort of. But maybe not always.

Alvin Ailey’s new home is a symbol of its status. “The $54 million structure – touted by its occupants as the largest in the United States dedicated exclusively to dance – symbolizes both the success the Ailey company has achieved and its commitment to making dance accessible. The increased space will allow the Ailey to do more of its signature outreach work, offering classes in dance and fitness to the general public for the first time starting in April.”

The New York-based American Contemporary Ballet company could be seen as just one more start-up troupe in an already-crowded dance scene. But ACB is about more than just traditional dance; it’s about reinventing the way in which dancers dance, and protecting them from injury. The idea that dancers should be able to do their job without hurting themselves may sound basic to outsiders, but inside the ballet world, choreographer Lincoln Jones’s quest for pain-free dance is almost revolutionary.

If choreography isn’t choreography, and dance isn’t dance (and yet it all is), what to make of Matthew Bourne, asks Tobi Tobias? “I’m left wondering if Play Without Words isn’t simply a sign of our times, in which the creative powers that be assume their audience needs to be lured by shock tactics—the raucous, the garish, the forbidden, extremes of novelty for novelty’s sake. Surely the insistent use of these means, which quashes the virtues of sincerity and subtlety, is self-defeating. Most of today’s audience is already beyond shock and, what’s more, benumbed by the ever-escalating onslaught.”

John Rockwell takes a tour of four American regional dance companies. “To be sure, brief stops at the San Francisco Ballet, the Boston Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago don’t provide enough evidence with which to pronounce on the state of dance in this country. Nor to make sweeping judgments about the companies’ current quality. My visits were partly serendipitous – accidents of travel, not an attempt to set up some spurious battle of the bands. Still, in this sampling, Philadelphia and Chicago came out handily on top of Boston and San Francisco. And all four programs attested to the paradox that everything old can be new again.”

Is Jérôme Bel a choreographer or a threatre artist? Bel, who has “become an international cult figure in the dance world by challenging its conventions” like working in the cracks of movement. “The question became, always, ‘How do I produce a show without dance?’ In France, we call my work conceptual, where the idea is more important than the realization. I’m not producing dance. I’m working at the borderline of dance.”