Category: dance

In 1932 the Nicholas brothers were the youngest dancers ever to showcase at the Cotton Club and the first performers allowed to mix with a white audience. They danced with George Balanchine, Gene Kelly, and can count Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov as some of their biggest fans.  After a life of tap dancing around racial barriers, chasing women, and approaching life with gusto, Harold Nicholas died this month at age 79. – LA Weekly

“Altynai Asylmuratova, the reigning ballerina of the Kirov, has always been a special performer, a deeply intense dancer who can squeeze every nuance out of a drama. She gives of herself so completely that it is not surprising to hear that she finds today’s cool aesthetic a little too contrived and calculated.” – The Times (London)

Jacob’s Pillow began as a modest showcase for the choreography of modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn. Now it is one of the most intense hotbeds of international dance activity in the world, each summer presenting “ballet to butoh, modern dance to hip-hop. With companies from the United States, France, Japan, Ireland, Africa, Sweden, Brazil, Spain, Canada, and The Netherlands, the festival’s current season is one of its most diverse to date.” – Christian Science Monitor

The Bolshoi takes America by storm. But this is a different Bolshoi than the one we’ve seen before. “It is a different company now. Each time chooses its own dancers.” – New York Times

“Barry Fischer envisioned an intimate program for a few dozen high school and college students from around the country. He imagined a place where they could take classes in the rigorous Graham technique and learn some of her repertoire. The three-week program, scheduled to start this Sunday, was to culminate with a performance of excerpts of Graham works danced by members of the Martha Graham Ensemble, a junior company.” And then came this week’s call for a boycott from unemployed Graham dancers. – Washington Post 

The Martha Graham Company dispute has turned nasty, with the company’s board and its artistic director publicly feuding. And the dancers? “Since the board voted to close shop, they have had no work, no pay and no daily classes to maintain the technique so crucial to performing Graham’s dances. But they had mostly kept quiet about it. Until now. In a statement issued this week, the dancers are calling for a boycott of the same choreography that they have striven to perfect.” – Washington Post

“The atmosphere has been electrifying” throughout the Kirov Ballet’s recent five-week run at Covent Garden. “Three times in the 20th century the Russians have come to teach us a lesson in the lively arts. What has sustained them through the century is a peculiar blend of collective outlook and blind conviction.” – The Telegraph (London)

St. Petersburg is the home of great ballet, home of famed Russian dance companies. “Unfortunately, virtually every package tour of St. Petersburg feels the cultural necessity of including a ballet performance in its offering – rather as Paris tours once felt equally compelled to provide the Folies Bergere, or Le Moulin Rouge and Pigalle. But the tourists’ ballets, as I recently discovered to my cost, are occasionally questionable. – New York Post

“Two years ago, Bill T. Jones was approached by Arena de le Sol in Bologna, Italy, to make a dance depicting the influence of Latin culture in the New World. Though confronted with issues of colonization and what Jones describes as cultural ‘collision,’ he decided to make a poetic rather than a political response to the unjust historical truths surrounding these native communities. ‘Ultimately, I’m trying to enter this on the level of culture and art,’ he says. ‘I’m trying to tell the story as I see it, and what that looked like in terms of music.’ ” – Village Voice

Dancers of the now-disbanded Martha Graham Company will release a letter today asking that “any dance company currently licensed to perform the choreographer’s work refrain from doing so until the Graham dancers themselves have come to a workable agreement with the Martha Graham Trust and director Ron Protas and are able to resume their own performance of Graham’s pieces.” – Chicago Sun-Times