Category: dance

BETTER INMATES THROUGH DANCE

Dancer takes on the guys in juvenile detention and they go for it. “In here, we don’t get to jump around. Because we’ve got to get along with other people when we are dancing, it also helps us do that when we aren’t dancing. In class you see that not everyone can learn the same and so you get to know a little about them if you help them with the steps.” – Dance Magazine

GOTTA DANCE

Ballroom dancing is very hot right now. Not just in studios and nightclubs, but onstage too. “The way I see it, ballroom has existed in this sort of cocoon, in the studios and competitions. It was almost its own unique little world, like a step back in time. When you think of ballroom, you think of the slicked-back hair and the fake tans and the sequins…. We want to sort of deconstruct that myth.” – Christian Science Monitor

ADVENTURES IN DANCE

London’s 13-year-old modern dance troupe Adventures in Motion Picture (AMP) announces it will move into the Old Vic Theatre as company-in-residence beginning in 2002. Under choreographer Matthew Bourne, AMP’s “outrageously entertaining shows drew on traditions of showbiz, classical ballet, and film, and rapidly attracted a public far wider than hard-core dance fans.” Once the company takes up its new residence, it will become the only major British dance company, other than the two Royal Ballet companies, with its own home-base theater. – The Guardian

ONLY THE BRAVE NEED APPLY

“Now we have a school which would make 90 percent of European ballet schools envious,” says the director of the Bolshoi Ballet’s first school outside Russia – in Joinville, Brazil, of all places. Needless to say, the new school will abide the by the old Bolshoi’s legendary standards of rigorous training. “It’s not about putting on a tutu and pointe shoes and learning some classical positions. Only those who will be true to the cause will remain. We will be happy if we produce two top-level dancers – it will make the school worth existing.” – The Times of India (AP)

JOFFREY REBORN

By the time it left New York to relocate in Chicago in 1995, the Joffrey Ballet was a mess – in desperate financial condition and in artistic turmoil. “With typical Joffrey gumption and considerable help from an expanding group of supporters in Chicago with high-powered civic connections, the company has not only survived but acquired a presence here that it never had in New York.” – New York Times