Category: dance

Merce Cunningham has always been an experimenter, willing to try new things. “So it’s no surprise that he has chosen experimental rock bands, Radiohead from Britain and Iceland’s Sigur Rós, to co-create the score for his next work, ‘Split Sides,’ premièring in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”

A mass public performance of dance from the movie “Singing in the Rain” is being mounted in Australia as part of the Melbourne Festival. “Thousands of people are expected to don raincoats and gumboots at Federation Square on October 9 to learn the dance immortalised by Gene Kelly in the film of the same name. A Melbourne Festival spokeswoman said as far as they knew, it was the first time a mass production of the the dance with members of the public had been undertaken.”

Boston Ballet will look very different this fall. That’s because 32 of the company’s 55 dancers will be new to the company. “Any time you have a big bunch of new dancers,” artistic director Mikko Nissinen said, “it changes the company’s chemistry.” To find his new hires, he held auditions in London, New York, and Boston. “I saw over 1,000 people in the process. They’re going to enhance the qualities I’m emphasizing onstage: more musicality; clean technique; simple, fresh presentation; and quality, quality, quality.”

Summer is the doldrums for dance. But the video store offers a surprising wealth of good movies featuring dance…if you know where to look…

Toronto’s Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA) is expanding its lineup and revamping its image this year, in an effort to draw a wider variety of performers and raise the festival’s international profile. This year’s fFIDA features multiple programs running at the same time in different venues, and a far higher concentration of non-Canadian dancers than usual. “Another change this year is the deliberate linking of choreographers to create interesting programs, rather than letting serendipity rule, even though fFIDA participants are still selected by lottery.”

The phenomenon of ‘contact improvisation’ is going strong in the modern dance world, despite having been dismissed by many serious dancers as a fad when it was invented in the 1970s. In fact, many modern choreographers say that the improvisational technique has been crucial to their development. “A product of its time, [contact improv] emphasizes spontaneity, togetherness, body/mind integration and other Age of Aquarius values.” Call it the dance equivalent of free-association literature.

“On Saturday night the Canadian-owned Inmet mining company set a cultural record by hosting a dance performance – 1,410 metres down its copper and zinc mine in Pyhäsalmi, 475 kilometres north of Helsinki. According to organizers, the 45-minute performance, which went off without a hitch, set a new record for physical profundity in dance.”

Twyla Tharp planned a New York season on short notice. She’s a loner — relieved, she’s been saying in interviews, not to be saddled with a large institution, with “real estate.” Over the years, she’s proved that she can do just about anything she sets out to do, so what does she want to do now? Can she stay small while getting bigger and bigger? Will she seriously commit herself to revivifying her important work from the past, either under own banner or elsewhere?”

The Kirov Ballet recreates Nijinsky’s infamous “Rite of Spring” in the original version which caused scandals in Paris in 1913. “Millicent Hodson, a ballet archaeologist has, with her husband Kenneth Archer, has spent the last 10 years recreating every step of the original, in which a young girl is chosen by her peers to dance herself to death, as a sacrifice to ensure the return of the Spring.”

Ismene Brown writes that trying to recreate a ballet whose steps were forgotten seven years after they were first seen is a fraud. “It is a travesty and it makes you believe that Nijinksy was a fraud, who parachuted on greater talents to create the work that sealed his reputation. The Kirov’s acquisition of this contaminated object is a cardinal mistake, and they must dump it like a stone.”