Category: dance

“The company has revealed ambitious details of its ‘comeback’ after a seven-month break from full performances on the Covent Garden stage. The plan is for a celebration performance with 100 dancers and a full orchestra on 9 October, livestreamed around the world. … And while it will be socially distanced, there will be dance duets thanks to couples in bubbles.” – The Guardian

“That disconnect grows wider every year as contemporary choreographers look beyond ballet — if not beyond white Western forms entirely — in search of new inspiration and foundational techniques. Yet dancers at almost all of the world’s leading mixed-rep ensembles take ballet classes before rehearsals and shows. Most companies rarely depart from ballet more than twice a week and some never offer alternative classes.” This has, in fact, been a subject of debate since Diaghilev’s day. – Dance Magazine

Rainer, avant-garde choreographer and filmmaker, has a new book out. “A book about dance is a book, but it is also a mirror. And when a choreographer puts a mirror up to her work, angling to see it with new clarity, she often encounters her own reflection: her image and the mythologies of that image, her layered and conflicting legacies, the ways in which she has moved through the world — or appeared to.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Says Festival Ballet Providence director Kathleen Breen Combes, “I kept getting these emails of dancers saying they just need a place to train this year. I thought, What if we could provide a space for dancers to get stronger, experiment and try new things in a nonjudgmental and no-pressure environment?” And so the company’s Leap Year program was born. – Pointe Magazine

“Dance … is an art form that frequently involves the kind of bodily contact that, in a nondance context, would be watched extremely closely, perhaps nervously. … Despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that dancers are often nearly as comfortable with other bodies as they are with their own, it’s important to make and maintain space for honesty about personal limits and power dynamics.” Zachary Whittenburg looks at how the techniques and principles that intimacy coordinators use in theater and film can be applied to concert dance. – Dance Magazine

Fortunately, she meticulously documented them, too. “Over the years, thousands of hours of rehearsal footage accumulated in Brown’s archive, most of which make up 1,200 videotapes known as the Building Tapes. … After an extensive search for the right home, the company is placing its founder’s archive — including the Building Tapes and corresponding notebooks, known as the Building Notebooks — at the … New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.” Siobhan Burke takes a look at what’s in there. – The New York Times

The incomprehensibly high number of complaints, though astonishing, speaks to Britain’s problematic conceptualisation of race and its relationship to racism. It shows a general intolerance to confront it. This, in part, is based on the denial of racism and a mythical idea of Britain as post-racial, where racism and racial inequality no longer exist. – The Conversation

“Trey McIntyre, Amy Seiwert, and Gregory Dawson [talk about] what they are doing to keep their companies afloat and … about their perspectives on dance, ballet, digital dance offerings, and the state of the art.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

Well, to be truthful, it’s his performers who are engaging the grain directly. Artist Lee Mingwei’s performance installation Our Labyrinth, a meditative ritual in which performers sweep a mound of rice across a floor, has arrived at the Met Museum. Met Live Arts director Limor Tomer got the idea to add movement by Jones, who says he isn’t changing Lee’s piece but rather “infecting” it. – The New York Times