Dance

Marius Petipa’s 19th century choreography for Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and many more classical ballets is focused on how a ballerina becomes a sculpture in male hands. “The woman goes on point; the man does the partnering. The positions may not be reversed. What’s going on here? Is he serving her or controlling her? He subordinates himself to making her all the more spectacular, but which one is in charge? We can say that such behavior glorifies women — or that it falsifies them.” – The New York Times

If the body-shaming tactics allegedly employed by many NBA dance teams are troubling, the dancers’ stories suggest that the compensation is worse. Three women remembered getting paid $50 a game; one said she took home $65. Three others said they made just $25 a practice, and one said that she and her teammates weren’t paid for practice at all. To put all that in perspective, the average price of a single NBA ticket during the 2012-2013 season (the earliest year this salary was mentioned) was $50. – Yahoo News

“There’s no definitive case law determining this.” When the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed, it finally established rules around choreography, with some limited fair use cases around criticism and dance education. Strangely enough, it covered even pantomime, but not an individual dance move as we’ve culturally come to understand it in the ensuing decades. – The Verge

Antony Hamilton, a longtime dancer and sometime choreographer with the company, replaces Anouk van Dijk as artistic director. Joining him as executive director is Kristy Ayre, also a former Chunky Move dancer; the two will be joint CEOs. — The Age (Melbourne)

Most European companies have at least five ranks for their dancers, based on the system developed at the Paris Opera Ballet. Most North American companies limit themselves to corps de ballet, soloist, and principal; the Joffrey does without rankings altogether. And when Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen wanted to make his company’s seven-rank system more egalitarian, the dancers themselves objected. Joseph Carman looks at the advantages and disadvantages of dancer ranks. — Dance Magazine

“Today, as I travel around the country giving master classes, … I can’t help but notice my students’ eyes widening as they look to each other wondering who exactly [one or another once-famous American ballerina] is. … As we navigate ourselves forward, it might be good to glance back more often, to see how and why those before us did what they did.” — Dance Magazine

They’re certainly not at the point of having public performances by women in tights and tutus yet, but ballet classes are becoming ever more popular, for adult women as well as for girls, especially in Jeddah. — Arab News

At what point does a social dance become so normalized, that no one flinches to see it? Because individual movements can’t be copyrighted, it’s not like they have an expiry date (like music) when they slip into the public domain.  With today’s rapidly evolving technology, where things are easily sharable and monetizable, it might be time to revamp the Copyright Office’s laws for individual dance moves. – Dance Magazine

Dancers from San Francisco Ballet, Ballet West in Salt Lake City, Tulsa Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Ballet Austin tell how their performances have changed over the years and share their key self-care tips. — Dance Magazine

“The minute I heard I was going to do a little number, that sold me,” Van Dyke tells PEOPLE in the latest issue out Friday. “And I thought I could contribute by just being a little bit of a reminder of the original. And I think it turned out well. I got to jump up on a desk and do a dance number. It surprised everybody, but nobody was as surprised as I was.” – People

And some of that is thanks to Angelina Ballerina, apparently – though more of it may be due to women knowing ballet can provide a space of physical practice and self-expression.  – Arab News

Travel writer Seth Kugel visits Permangolinha, a retreat in the Brazilian state of Bahia where visitors — disciples, really — study the martial arts-based movement form with Mestre Cobra Mansa (Master Tame Snake) and work on his permaculture farm. — The New York Times

Prumsodun Ok is a Cambodian-American who studied Khmer court dance in the US and ultimately in Phnom Penh. Now he’s the founding artistic director of Natyarasa, Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company, which performs traditional dances in (what’s the best word?) gender-fluid form as well as newly-created works. (video) — Atlas Obscura

Author and professor Catherine Taylor offers an impressionistic longread, with plenty of video clips, about how her midlife crisis moved her to travel to southern Spain for serious study of the form — and about how its aesthetic and mindset changed her way of being. — The Believer

Running a contemporary dance institution with such a long history (read: stability) will be quite a change for Benoit Swan Pouffer: Cedar Lake collapsed in 2015 after its sole funder pulled out. — The Guardian

“Because of him, ballet could not exclude us,” said Virginia Johnson, one of Mitchell’s first dancers and the current artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “We were his army, united in the love of an art form.” Dance Theatre of Harlem’s entrepreneurship and success became “the impetus for what we know as culturally specific dance companies” today. – The Guardian

The veteran journalist, who is also the author of the novels on which the TV series Killing Eve is based, tweeted that, after 14 years, “it’s time to step aside and pursue new projects.” — The Stage

This year’s list includes an amputee tap dancer, a young man whose star-making performance was partnering a wooden stool, and a dancer-cum-planetary geologist whose TED talk about choreographing for near-zero gravity is titled, “Netflix and Chill at 0 Kelvin.” — Dance Magazine

Dance/USA’s most recent Annual Financial Survey (2017), shows that Nutcracker/holiday revenue now represents an average of 48 percent of the surveyed dance companies’ overall season revenues and a median of 55 percent. As a percentage of total revenues, it represents an average and median of 15 percent. – Dance/USA

The co-captain is a senior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, and he isn’t kidding when he says, “Although we are all MIT students, dance is an outlet for us where we can be carefree and have fun.” – MIT News

Andrea Schermoly becomes the ballet’s third resident choreographer in a smaller ballet company that is newly committed to new work. The South African dancer had worked with choreography in college, and that “ended up being a great background when Schermoly faced a dance career ending injury and was able to turn full time to choreography.” – WFPL (Kentucky)

“Contemporary dancers seem more natural to me, they look more like human beings – like real life. In classical ballet there are certain rules. I can’t be an ordinary contemporary woman, I can [only] be a princess – pointe shoes, pointe shoes.” – The Stage

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in how people move in everyday life. The way someone leaps over a puddle in the gutter to hail a cab or the way one person holds a door for another. Or even the way cooks in a restaurant kitchen work with synchronicity in their confined quarters. … That instinct became the jumping-off point for this series of Great Performers films simple gestures drawn from the everyday.” — New York Times Magazine

“Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer, created a series of dance films for the year’s best actors. The scenarios put everyday characters in familiar situations: packed into a subway car, stuck in a doctor’s office, caught in downpour. But once they start moving, the actors” — Julia Roberts, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Glenn Close, Regina Hall, Yoo Ah-In, Ethan Hawke, Elsie Fisher, Yalitza Aparicio, and (together) Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, And Rachel Weisz — “turn our common experiences into welcome moments of enchantment.” — New York Times Magazine

Val Caniparoli has created different versions of the piece for the Cincinnati, Louisville, Grand Rapids, and Royal New Zealand Ballets, and at San Francisco Ballet he’s danced the settings by Lew Christensen and Helgi Tomasson. He talks to Avichai Scher about how he keeps them all straight in his head and different on the stage. — Dance Magazine

“There is someone less than a foot away from me, just off of my right shoulder, observing the way I’m holding my hand strangely, but perhaps gracefully? I hope my nails are clean. My arm is starting to tremble. I’m not even sure how much time has gone by. I let my arm gently, almost imperceptibly, fall, allowing my shoulder to melt with it, and stop myself mid-breath. “I am…right here,” I say to myself with my director’s voice in my head. I am ON DISPLAY .” Victoria Dombroski of Heidi Latsky Dance describes the experience of being in Latsky’s ON DISPLAY, a “human sculpture court.” (includes video) — Dance Magazine

Sofia Castán Vargas, a 16-year-old San Diegan/Tijuana now enrolled at the Alonso Cuban National Ballet School, and Catherine Conley, a 20-year-old alumna who stayed on to become a corps member in the Cuban National Ballet, talk about the challenges a student from the U.S. wull face and the particular qualities of Cuban training that drew them there. — Pointe Magazine