Category: dance

Seventy-four years after it was written, a Shostakovich ballet received its world premiere in Moscow last weekend. “For the first time in 74 years his 1931 score The Bolt rang out from a theatre pit, and its story was told in ballet on the stage above, in a new production by the Bolshoi Ballet.”

A new study looks at the creative process of making dance. “The publication, Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, is the first to address the cognitive processes behind the creation of new works of contemporary dance.”

The choreography of Christopher Wheeldon has turned a lot of heads in recent years, but it isn’t necessarily the grand scope of his vision that separates him from the pack. “What Wheeldon tunes in to, rather, are the little mysteries of human expression. How a series of steps colored by the right inflection of feeling can change the temperature of a ballet. How wistfulness, trepidation and heartache are communicated with a look and a gesture and, perhaps, a particularly expressive arch of the foot.”

Good art can illuminate the human condition. But can dance do justice to the killings fields of Pol Pot’s horrible regime? “There were 300 musicians and dancers in the royal palace and only 30 came back. They survived by hiding their identities – they told Pol Pot’s cadres that they were seamstresses or pedicab drivers.”

“The main reason for Ireland’s historical disregard for dance is that this is a country where literature, poetry and theatre maintain an absolute hegemony at the expense of non-verbal art forms. But equally to blame is Catholicism, which led to dance being regarded as immoral, sinful and degenerate… The final impediment was Irish folk dance, enshrined as the only public form permissible by the Dance Halls Act of 1935.” But choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan is finally introducing Ireland to modern dance, almost single-handedly defying decades of disinterest and forging a dance movement that is simultaneously classic, anarchic, and distinctly Irish.

The best place to see New York City Ballet? Gotta be the fourth ring. Not only can you see the structure of the choreography, there’s also Miriam Pellman…

Christo’s Central Park Gates are art, sure. But they’re also a kind of dance through the park, writes Tobi Tobias. “The project as a whole makes a major part of its impact through repetition. This repetition, as you tread The Gates’ paths, deftly turns footfall into drum- or heartbeat. Martha Graham used the same steady-pulse phenomenon in the formally paced entrances and exits that frame the sections of her Primitive Mysteries. Laura Dean, choreographing to the music of Steve Reich, made it the keystone of her contribution to postmodern dance.”

Ballet is a fairly ethereal art form, based as it is on the wonder of watching the human body do things that most human bodies cannot do, and even a cursory glance at the history of the form suggests a positive obsession with female characters who reflect that spooky, supernatural, and ultimately unattainable image. “The lure of the otherworldly heroine took strongest hold in the Romantic era, when ballet, like the rest of European culture, became enthralled by the gothic and the supernatural… [But] even when romanticism waned, the popularity of the ethereal, magical heroine persisted.”

Dancers of the Washington Ballet have voted 18-2 to unionize. They’ll be represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA). The vote took place in a secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board on Mon., Feb. 14. AGMA represents dancers and opera singers in the United States. In early December 2004, the ballet company’s dancers asked AGMA to represent them and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement on their behalf.”

Members of the Russian Orthodox Church are protesting a ballet called Rasputin that features a character portraying Czar Nicholas II. “Orthodox Christians are offended by the fact that Emperor Nicholas II will be shown dancing in the production. In Czarist Russia, it was not permitted even to show the images of saints on the stage.”