Dance

“More than a year after he left amid allegations of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse, he continues to make his presence felt in ways both big and small — including by ordering last-minute cast changes in performances of his ballets and showing up backstage after a show,” much to some dancers’ discomfort. – The New York Times

Hala Shah: “Growing up, I never saw a problem with my dancing and neither did my Muslim-Egyptian dad or my non-Muslim, American mom. … When I married my Pakistani husband, who comes from a more conservative approach to Islam, I suddenly encountered perceptions of dance that made me question everything: Is it okay to expose a lot of skin? Is it wrong to dance with other men? Is dance inherently sexual? What guidelines come from our holy book, the Quran, and what are cultural views that have become entwined in Islam?” – Dance Magazine

“The Dance Data Project … has published a report on leadership pay among the 50 biggest ballet companies in the U.S, broken down by gender. Here are some of the most interesting findings.” – Dance Magazine

“What’s most important for the company is the legacy, taking care of Pina’s works and then finding the best way to look forward,” says director and choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen, whose Bon Voyage, Bob recently premiered in Bausch’s home theatre and is now in London. – The Stage

Anthony Huxley (the Prince): “For me [the difficult thing] always is the acting and being a presence onstage … because I’m not a natural projector with my face.”
Indiana Woodward (Aurora): “The suitors are all rooting for you. They’re all like [whispers]: ‘You can do it. You can do it.’ I’m like, ‘Help.'” – The New York Times

Ellie Cotey offers a diary of last week’s world premiere of choreographer Yuri Possokhov’s Anna Karenina, which has 200 complete costumes and more than 800 individual pieces. – Dance Magazine

“We didn’t lose our funding. … It was something I did. I approached the board. I told them the last thing I felt I had time to do was create, to make ballets. They agreed. This kind of structure and organization — I know I am not the only one to say it — doesn’t work for me now.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

Ausdance National, the country’s advocate organization for the art form, has been presenting the honors annually since 1997. This year, in response to deep cuts in government funding throughout the arts, Ausdance has called off the awards and will focus its efforts on advocacy for dance as a whole. – Dance Australia

“I know what it’s like to have to go through puberty in a leotard,” said Kondos Field, a former professional ballerina who had little experience in gymnastics instruction when she joined the UCLA program nearly four decades ago. “I know what it’s like to have disordered eating. I know what it’s like to have to go out there by yourself.” – The New York Times

One night, a young man in dance school worried about his future walked by an Army recruitment center in Manchester – and joined up. Alex Smith “says that, despite appearances, dancers and soldiers have quite a lot in common. Self-discipline is important in both cases, and a determination to succeed.” – BBC

“I’m a street dance choreographer. I do street dance on street dancers. I’ve never set an hour-long piece on any other company outside my own, and definitely not on a modern dance company.” Nevertheless, Ailey artistic director Robert Battle decided that Harris was the right person to be the company’s first-ever choreographer in residence. – Dance Magazine

Rojo: “I wanted to do a classical ballet from a new point of view, and I wanted the hardest one … I had seen the Björk film Dancer in the Dark, and I kept thinking: This is Giselle, and it is possible to tell this story in a new context.”
Khan: “When Tamara asked me, I did think a bit: Are you mad? I had barely seen a ballet, and knew nothing about Giselle.” – The New York Times

Staying in love with dance takes grit. Choosing to pursue a lifelong relationship with dance involves the risk of physical injury, financial instability and the ups and downs inherent in a creative passion-driven career. – Crosscut

The company will offer guest performances on selected Celebrity Cruises vessels. Said executive director Kara Medoff Barnett in a statement, “American Ballet Theatre’s mission is to bring the best of ballet to the widest possible audience. We are thrilled to redefine ‘widest’ to now include audiences at sea.” – Orlando Sentinel

“A Russian company called Siberian Swan has just announced the debut of the first pointe shoe model specifically designed for men, named ‘Rudolf’ (after Nureyev, of course). It will be released next month, giving men an alternative to custom orders.” – Dance Magazine

“In Non Solus, a dancer becomes an acrobat, and an acrobat becomes a dancer. Recirquel Company Budapest may be a circus company, but its meditative, evening-length production is no circus spectacle. It’s more like ballet in the air.” – The New York Times

The city has lost a third of its Latin dance studios over the past five years, “in a city that touts itself as a culture-rich salsa town, but that, according to the some of the region’s longtime owners, doesn’t offer enough resources for these institutions to thrive.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Ellie Cosgrave, a lecturer in urban innovation at University College London, is collaborating with Theatrum Mundi to look at how choreographic methods could improve urban engineering. Choreographers and engineers have some key things in common, she says: they both design materials and experiences through time and space.” – The Guardian

“People trying to assess Peter Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.” – The New Yorker

Need we say any more? (We will: They’re real. The photographer: “There’s a wave of change that is happening in the dance world and it was important to me to push it forward.”) – CBC

Teacher and former dancer Sara Bibik: “When we ask dancers to do it, we say to ourselves, ‘We are a struggling company trying to make ends meet. We are incurring an expense and so we have to try to make that up.’ This doesn’t hold enough water … because you pay this business expense when finding new employees or contractors for all other positions.” (Such as controller, stage manager, or executive director.) — Dance Magazine

“The outside eye saw the success of Once On This Island, Jesus Christ Superstar Live, ink [at the Kennedy Center], and my cover on Dance Magazine,” the dancer-choreographer writes. “But over the course of 2017 and 2018, my appendix ruptured twice, I was in the hospital at least four times, and had two surgeries. For over a year, my attire consisted of baggy clothes to hide my stomach, PICC line, and bandages.” — Dance Magazine

That would be none other than the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “It regularly films dance productions in the city, preserving the present for the future; it aims to have a copy of every dance book ever published; it possesses treasures going back centuries. And its doors are open to the public as well as to specialist researchers.” Alastair Macaulay looks at a few of its gems, from a 1453 treatise to 1933 films of Balinese dance. — The New York Times

The worst fire in California destroyed Trudi Angel’s ballet school in Paradise, along with costumes and sets for the Nutcracker she’d been putting on there for 33 years (and along with pretty much everything in the entire town). But Angel’s young students pleaded with her to keep the show going this year — and the many people she knew in the wider ballet world pitched in to help. — San Francisco Chronicle

Camille Brown burst into Broadway with her choreography for the award-winning revival of Once on This Island, and now she’s everywhere, even using a dramaturg to help tell stories on Broadway, through dance. – Playbill

Vicky Shick creates and edits at the same time, her dancers say, so they have to pay careful attention during rehearsals. “Shick’s works have become more exacting as they reveal the complexity of who she is: a 67-year-old choreographer who was born in Hungary and had dreams of becoming a ballerina, but instead carved out a career in postmodern dance. … With precision and strangeness, her dances celebrate the very thing she finds herself racked with: vulnerability.” – The New York Times

“For the position, a three-year residency to begin in February, Ms. Tanowitz will create three commissioned dances, including a collaboration with the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns; she will also develop a digital archive of her work.” — The New York Times