Dubbed Nigeria's viral ballet dancer, 13-year-old Anthony Madu's life has changed beyond recognition over the last three years after his dance moves and internet fame catapulted him from his modest home in Lagos to one of the UK's most prestigious ballet schools. - BBC
At San Francisco Ballet, the snow is made of thousands of pieces of thin paper soaked in a flame-retardant salt solution, stored in 400-pound barrels and dropped from four 150-pound bags. Two hints for dancers: don't rosin your shoes too much and don't breathe through your nose. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
The Italian-born choreographer was a principal at La Scala Ballet, created works for that company's ballet school, and founded his own company, Heliopolis, before working as artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet (2014-17) and later co-founding the Sydney Choreographic Centre. - Calgary Herald
Li Cunxin, who found fame beyond the dance world with the memoir and documentary with that title, announced in June that he's retiring as artistic director of the Brisbane-based company due to health concerns. Succeeding him is the Queensland-born former Royal Ballet principal Leanne Benjamin. - ABC (Australia)
The six performers sacked by the company — a week after going on strike over the board's refusal to address unsafe working conditions — have formed the Central New York Ballet. They made their debut at a sold-out holiday performance in Syracuse this week. - CNY Central (Syracuse)
In total, the BBC has now spoken to more than 100 former dancers who attended UK schools from the 1990s through to the present day, and who all claim they experienced a "damaging" culture. - BBC
"DDP findings show that women choreographed 50% of the works programmed at the dance festivals collected in 2023, the highest percentage of female-choreographed pieces yet. … However, the percentage of full-length works choreographed by women was much lower than in the past, at just 36%." - Dance Data Project
"Performing has always been my most challenging point. I didn’t live for the show — I lived for class, for rehearsal, being in new choreography, teaching. My 'why' is so much more clear now. I don’t want the authenticity of my art to be muddied by anything ego-driven." - Dance Magazine
The clip drew heavy criticism on Fox News and in The New York Post. It was shocking to see something as innocuous as “The Nutcracker” stir up such outrage. - The New York Times
Born the year after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, Panaíbra Canda, 47, has used his art to offer searing critiques of his nation’s evolution through the independence struggle, socialism, civil war, democracy and corruption. He also has taken aim at Western domination and jaded perceptions of Africa. - The New York Times
Greta Gerwig: Gosling thought "he would have a dance duet with his mink and that the mink would be fighting him and then love him and then fight him again, eventually defeat him, and that he would be birthed anew out of the mink." - MSN (The Hollywood Reporter)
"In theory, it will be a useful legal tool for all job seekers — and particularly powerful for artists. But in practice, it is likely to have symbolic rather than functional consequences for dancers." - The New York Times
Cynthia Graham, a principal with a previous incarnation of the company who retired from the stage in 1992, stepped in last month to direct this year's Nutcracker. She voluntarily stepped down following allegations that some of the current choreography for the Tchaikovsky ballet was plagiarized. - Ideastream (Cleveland)
"(Dr. Catie) Cuan has performed with robots for many years at venues such as the Smithsonian and Brown University, but her first public performance since graduation", this weekend in Brooklyn, is something else" "Breathless: Catie and the Robot, an eight-hour durational performance between Cuan and a robot arm." - Dance Magazine
"In (the treatise) On Dance," first-century philosopher Lucian of Samosata "makes two ground-breaking claims: that the body thinks, and that dance is the expression of a complete philosophy. … Only the dancer is not a philosopher but a ‘cheirosopher’, a coinage Lucian constructs ... with the addition of ‘cheiros’: gesture." - 3 Quarks Daily
