Category: dance

How to make sense of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”? The choreographer isn’t sure, even after years of work. Pam Tanowitz: “It’s massive, it’s hard, it’s abstract. I still don’t understand the poem. … I don’t think you would ever understand it. It’s the kind of thing where you pick it up in a different headspace, age, or whatever’s going on in your life, and you get different things from it.” – The Guardian (UK)

Farrell’s return to the company’s studios could be further evidence that its new leaders — Director Jonathan Stafford and Associate Director Wendy Whelan — are continuing to make changes for the good. It also seems like a healing act. – Washington Post

“If you’ve seen dancers flare their fingers in the flexed position often mockingly called ‘jazz hands,’ then you’ve seen Fosse, especially if those dancers were also sitting into one hip and hiding their eyes beneath a hat.” Not only did these moves become Fosse’s signature style, they’ve become completely incorporated into the American dance vocabulary. Critic Brian Seibert shows us those moves and their effectiveness in the mambo from the movie version of Damn Yankees. – The New York Times

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is creating new steps for Ivo van Hove’s Broadway production in December, and Justin Peck is doing the same for Steven Spielberg’s movie version. But arriving before those is this spring’s new production at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, making Aletta Collins the first choreographer to replace Robbins’s work in a major professional staging. Says the director, Sarah Frankcom, “Robbins was saying something about where dance was at that time. The relationship between dance and theatre is really different in 2019.” – The Guardian

“The ballet academy at Vienna’s renowned State Opera was hit Wednesday by allegations of serious physical and mental abuse against its students, as well as sexual assault. The weekly Falter newspaper published findings of a detailed investigation which it said exposed ’19th-century’ methods inflicted on students, illustrating the piece with a photo of the bloodied feet of a student after a day’s training.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

“On this episode of Women in Charge, Allison Benedikt talks to Virginia Johnson, artistic director and founding member of Dance Theatre of Harlem. They talk about how she shifted from principal dancer to founding member to artistic director. Johnson also shares stories about what it meant to grow up as a black ballerina and what progress is being made in the dance culture now.” (podcast) – Slate

Not exactly, no, but Silent Lines is about “the internal environment of the body” and very much draws on his training in Rolfing, the deep-tissue massage technique, and in other forms of bodywork. Writer Anna Winter talks with Maliphant about what he’s after in his new piece. – The Stage

“Off we went — and it was a ravishment. Nothing prepares you for the totality of Alvin Ailey: the aural, visual, physical, spiritual beauty. Up to that point, most high-culture excursions (usually school trips) had felt like sly training for a lifetime of partly satisfying adult aesthetic experiences: nice singing but absurd story, or good acting but incomprehensible 400-year-old text, and so on. To be permitted to hear the thickly stacked, honeyed gospel of “Wade in the Water,” while simultaneously watching those idealized, muscular arms — in every shade of brown — slowly rise and assume the shape of so many ancient amphoras! Heaven.” The New York Times