Category: dance

“A jury took less than three hours Friday to find a former Ballet San Antonio dancer not guilty in a sexual assault case brought by a ballerina in the company. The defense had argued that the accuser regretted having consensual sex as the two slept in her apartment bed in March 2017. Prosecutors said Hugo Ihosvany Rodriguez, 27, once a rising star with the dance company, never received a hint of approval yet forced himself on her.”

To be a professional-level dancer demands incredible discipline and years of training. It also requires an acute sensitivity to music, which in most instances serves as a choreographic propellant. Imagine, then, the challenge of becoming a dancer if you are seriously hearing impaired.

Edward Gorey “was very breezy about his opinions,” tossing them off in an artless manner, Peter Anastos says. “He just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.” He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, “the world’s tallest albino asparagus.” Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, “Les sylphides? Where they’re all looking for their contact lenses?” That said, his pronouncements were never mean spirited.

Misty Copeland thinks so. “‘[People] feel comfortable sitting in a movie theater rather than walking through the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House; you feel that ‘Oh, that’s not for me.’ Especially as black people, that’s not a space for us,’ Copeland said. ‘Everyone goes to the movie theater, so this is an amazing way to do that.'”

One dancer who was used to pancaking her shoe with makeup foundation that matched her skin: “To have a shoe that I can just put on and go? I … I never thought that would happen.”

It was reported at the ballet’s annual general meeting on Thursday that the company had a surplus of $257,000 on revenues of $35.528 million and expenses of $35.271 million.

“‘I wanted to explore what would happen if you could allow a person to perform on pointe 100 per cent of the time,’ said [Jae-Hyun] An, who developed [the] Marie-T over the course of four months. ‘How would ballet change? I wanted to create a tool for someone to take and let their imagination define the capabilities of the product.'”

“It’s like a cult,” says Alexandra Waterbury, the accuser at the center of the New York City Ballet nude photo-sharing scandal, of the deference that was given to the bad behavior of the likes of George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Peter Martins. As for why women don’t speak up and male dancers get a pass — as one former NYCB dancer puts it, “Women are a dime a dozen.”

Participants in a small-scale study scored higher on two measures of creativity after swallowing a tiny serving of hallucinogenic truffles—about one-tenth of a recreational dose. The drug did not stimulate similar improvement in an intelligence test, suggesting that its effects may be limited to enhancing innovation.