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DANCE

Toronto’s Only Purpose-Built Dance Venue Will Close After 41 Years

The Fleck Dance Theatre, located within the Queen's Quay Terminal building at the Harbourfront Centre, will be shuttered at the end of next March after Harbourfront Centre management declined to renew its lease. - Ludwig Van

Even After 30 Years, People Talk About (And Buy Tickets For) Matthew Bourne’s Gender-Switched “Swan Lake”

"Certain people found it difficult to accept Swan Lake in a new light," says Bourne. "There was some ballet snobbery when people would say the choreography was a bit repetitive. Anyone watching a classical ballet will know that the steps are often repeated. (But the) vast majority of audiences really bought into it." - Bachtrack

Can Audio Description For The Visually Impaired Work For Dance As It Does For Theatre?

Stopgap, a contemporary dance company which integrates variously disabled and neurodiverse performers, has a piece titled Lived Fiction in which audio description is integral to the work. Partially-sighted writer Caroline Butterwick came to find out if description can work with an art form as purely visual as dance is. - The Guardian

Raygun, The Notorious Olympic Breakdancer, Retires From Competition And Public Performance

Rachael Gunn of Australia already has an established career as an academic (studying breakdancing and popular culture), and the public roasting she received after her zero-points performance at the Olympic finals in Paris, along with subsequent worldwide scrutiny on social media, have become too much to put up with. - AP

How Choreographers Create Dance Movement For Straight Plays

"(This) which can mean adding subtle movement that never registers as choreography, or creating an unapologetic, front-facing dance number, or designing dancing that looks totally spontaneous — mostly without any dance-trained bodies." Choreographers Susan Stroman, Sonya Tayeh, and Sam Pinkleton explain how they meet the challenge. - Dance Magazine

Major Neurological Study Looks At How Our Brains Respond To Live Dance

"A pioneering five-year research project, Neurolive, run by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling, … brings together neuroscience and dance to investigate what’s happening in our brains when we watch live performance." - The Guardian

Dallas Black Dance Theatre Is Working To Settle Labor Complaint And May Rehire Its Fired Dancers

"(Management) said it is working on a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board and ... the labor union representing 10 dancers who were fired earlier this year. … The news comes after the NLRB notified the dance company it would move forward with a complaint unless Dallas Black settled." - KERA (Dallas)

Dallas Black Dance Theatre’s Conflict With Its Dancers: A Timeline

When and how it all went down, from the dancers' vote to unionize through management sacking the lot of them and subsequent legal action and public protests. - KERA (Dallas)

Why Choreographer Oona Doherty Has Grabbed The Contemporary Dance World’s Attention

Her "refusal to compromise­ with movement that felt inauthentic (and) her instinctive­ pull towards the extreme and the subversive" were channeled into her first major piece, Hope Hunt and the Ascension Into Lazarus, which premiered in 2015 and has been touring off-and-on ever since. - Dance Magazine

Troubled Royal Danish Ballet Picks A New Leader

The company announced on Thursday that Amy Watson, a California-born dancer who joined the troupe in 2000, would serve as its next artistic director. - The New York Times

Nikolaj Hübbe Out As Director Of Royal Danish Ballet

After months of turmoil around allegations of drug use and bullying, the former New York City Ballet star, who led his homeland's flagship ballet company for 16 years, resigned last week following five months of medical leave. Acting artistic director Amy Watson now takes the position in full. - The New York Times

Dance Company Jennifer Muller/The Works Re-Establishes Itself Following Its Founder’s Death

Fifty years after choreographer Muller created her troupe in New York City and a year-and-a-half after she passed away aged 78, Jennifer Muller/The Works has gathered a group of company alumni to form a board and continue the organization's work, led by two co-artistic directors and an executive director. - Dance Informa

How Choreographers Are Experimenting With AI

"The impact of artificial intelligence ... can already be seen across film, television and music, but to some extent dance seems insulated, as a form that so much relies on live bodies performing in front of an audience." Yet several choreographers (most notably, Wayne McGregor) are working with the technology. - The Guardian

A Dostoevsky Ballet?? Yep. ABT Is Dancing “Crime And Punishment”

"Acknowledging that the idea sounds inadvisable, (director James) Bonas and (choreographer Helen) Pickett explained in interviews what they saw instead as promising: Dostoyevsky’s hefty 19th-century novel has a clear dramatic line, and a small core of complex characters … And the book is a will-he-get-caught page-turner, Pickett added." - The New York Times

Empty New York Office Buildings Have Been Essential For This Dance Company

In the midst of the pandemic, one real estate management firm “said they needed tenants who would show up to work.” So the Paul Taylor Dance Company took advantage of a real estate law loophole, renovated, and moved in. - The New York Times

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