Category: dance

Joan Acocella: How New York City Ballet Was Brought Down To Earth (An Epic And Chilling Account)

“People trying to assess Peter Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.” – The New Yorker

Dance Companies, Stop Making Dancers Pay To Audition! (An Open Letter)

Teacher and former dancer Sara Bibik: “When we ask dancers to do it, we say to ourselves, ‘We are a struggling company trying to make ends meet. We are incurring an expense and so we have to try to make that up.’ This doesn’t hold enough water … because you pay this business expense when finding new employees or contractors for all other positions.” (Such as controller, stage manager, or executive director.) — Dance Magazine

The Last Two Years Were The Biggest Of Camille A. Brown’s Career — And She Nearly Died. Twice.

“The outside eye saw the success of Once On This Island, Jesus Christ Superstar Live, ink [at the Kennedy Center], and my cover on Dance Magazine,” the dancer-choreographer writes. “But over the course of 2017 and 2018, my appendix ruptured twice, I was in the hospital at least four times, and had two surgeries. For over a year, my attire consisted of baggy clothes to hide my stomach, PICC line, and bandages.” — Dance Magazine

Treasures From The World’s Largest Archive Of Dance Materials

That would be none other than the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “It regularly films dance productions in the city, preserving the present for the future; it aims to have a copy of every dance book ever published; it possesses treasures going back centuries. And its doors are open to the public as well as to specialist researchers.” Alastair Macaulay looks at a few of its gems, from a 1453 treatise to 1933 films of Balinese dance. — The New York Times

Reimagining Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ For Ballet

First, who was the Dark Lady? Most likely, it was a black brothel owner in London known as Lucy Negro — whom actress and poet Caroline Randall Williams took as the inspiration for her 2015 book Lucy Negro, Redux. That book in turn inspired choreographer Paul Vasterling’s new work, Attitude: Lucy Negro Redux, which he created for dancer Kayla Rowser and Nashville Ballet, with music by MacArthur fellow Rhiannon Giddens and text from the book performed by Williams herself. — Dance Magazine