“I was thinking, she’s the mother of modern dance,” said English National Ballet artistic director Aaron S Watkin. “She’s so iconic and famous, but hardly anyone is doing (her work in the UK).” His company and a few others may be changing that. - The Guardian
“By now I’ve spent upward of 5,000 hours in ballet classes, and roughly 1,600 hours more in other, non-ballet dance classes. … I dance as if it were my job.” - Slate
Walsh helped Scarlett create several scenes for the London premiere in 2016, then danced the title role in the 2017 revised version at San Francisco Ballet. Walsh was injured for the 2018 revival, so he helped stage it, and he has restaged it several times since Scarlett’s death in 2021. - L.A. Dance Chronicle
There are so many other things that I could be doing to accomplish my longtime goal of bringing more equity and awareness of ballet’s lack of diversity, and finding ways to meet people where they are in communities like I grew up in. That started to override how I felt about being onstage. - Dance Magazine
“While Vancouver offers a wealth of contemporary-dance companies and high-caliber ballet schools, ‘no one is bringing classical ballet here beyond a touring Nutcracker, or producing it on a professional level,’ Beamish says. (The well-established Ballet BC performs mainly contemporary repertoire off-pointe.)” - Pointe Magazine
The world’s oldest ballet company is known to most of the world for the precise, pristine classicism. At home, though, it’s been performing cutting-edge contemporary work for years, and it’s bringing to the States a new work by perhaps the most un-Paris Opera Ballet choreographer out there, Hofesh Schechter. - The New York Times
Mia J. Chong, a choreographer and currently a staging director for ODC, will succeed 83-year-old founder Brenda Way. The 54-year-old dance organization encompasses a dance company which tours domestically and abroad, a school, a theater and a 50,00-square-foot campus in the Mission District. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
Valerie Allman: "I grew up dancing. That was my first love and I never expected that there would be such a parallel between dance and discus.” - The New York Times
Just months after most of the flagship summer festival was cancelled following the workplace death of a crew member, the dance mecca is hosting a program in October in the rebuilt Doris Duke Theatre: a weekend of tap by Caleb Teicher and Nic Gareiss. - The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA)
“Alexander Loxton, who played the ‘older Billy’ in the West End musical Billy Elliot as well as dancing with the Royal Ballet …, says he suffered a career-wrecking ankle ligament injury during an unjustified stop-and-search by Met Police in September 2016.” He is suing for £600,000 (roughly $800,000) in damages. - The Independent (UK)
“Joshua Bergasse spoke … about his role reproducing choreography, how an iconic Broadway musical translates to an opera stage, and the efforts to achieve laser synchronicity between Bernstein’s notes and Robbins’s moves.” - LA Dance Chronicle
Popular and productive, Arpino, who was 85 when he died in 2008, didn’t get much respect from influential critics. At various times they called his style slick, kitsch and facile. Audiences were less conflicted — for the most part, they seemed to love his ballets. - The New York Times
“’It really bores me, this transactional conversation,’ he says, meaning the choreographer explaining their intention; the audience expecting something explicit to be communicated. … ‘Especially in ballet, there’s a push all the time for concrete narrative. … I think we need to be much braver about trusting our instincts about what we’re receiving.’” - The Guardian
Zenetta Drew, who presided over last year’s fiasco — which cost the company $560,000 in a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board and $248,000 in withdrawn city funding — will retire later this year. Meanwhile, the board unanimously accepted the recommendations in an advisory task force’s report on repairing DBDT. - KERA (Dallas)
This report analyzes the gender distribution of Artistic, Executive, and Associate/Assistant Directors, as well as Heads of Schools, Heads of Second Companies, Rehearsal Directors, and, for the first time, music directors and conductors among the 150 largest ballet and classically-based dance companies in the US. - Dance Data Project
