It's a "miracle," he says, that a ballet in 1900 was notated at all, let alone that the notation survives. As for teaching the movement to performers in 2022, he says, "I very much disagree with the idea that the technique of the dancers is so much better now. I think it's just different." - The Age (Melbourne)
"Every day on the respiratory ward at one of (Bishkek's) biggest hospitals, nurse Aidai Temiraly kyzy puts on the music and leads her patients in the Kara Jorgo, the national dance. ... The session is part of a treatment programme offered to people with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease." - The Guardian
The players have their moves; the half-time dance team is a troupe of grannies; the ushers and umpires dance; the first-base coach is a professional hip-hop dancer. The Bananas, a fave on TikTok with 2.5 million followers, are the rare collegiate baseball team with a national following. - The New York Times
"What goes into transforming a work from screen to stage? What gets added, lost or modified? Pointe spoke with three choreographers to learn what made the process challenging and interesting." - Pointe Magazine
“The company is more racially diverse today than it was in 2020, when about 30% of the company was BIPOC. Racial identity should only be identified by the individual, but the company is currently about 45% individuals of color with five dancers identifying as Black or Brown." - Seattle Times
"I don't think we should be afraid of tackling complex stories and not feeling like the audience has to understand every second; one of the beauties of dance is that we get to escape into this poetic abstraction, even within a story ballet." - The Guardian
An Afro-Caribbean repertoire of quadrille square dances (accompanied by drumming and singing) that combines a complicated vocabulary of symbolic movements with improvisation, bèlè is seeing a revival on the island after long years of discouragement by a central government in Paris keen to promote continental French culture. - The Conversation
“Dancing is a form of escapism for some of us,” Diamond Hardiman, a 28-year-old dancer from Chicago, tells me. “So it’s about being real and honest, yes. But at the end of the day it’s also about being tough. You know, like, solid. And being free.” - Mic
"Four years ago, Alicia Graf Mack — a former star of Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey — took the reins of the dance division, with plans to usher in an altogether more diverse experience. The pandemic, alongside changing conversations around race and gender, shifted that evolution into high gear." - Vanity Fair
"Susan Jaffe, who recently turned 60, has in mind such steps as opening up artistic processes to the public and soliciting views from balletgoers and other stakeholders on the delicate task of updating thorny works from the classical canon. It's an audience-first approach." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Everybody Dance LA! is "an almost-too-good-to-be-true program founded more than 20 years ago by a grieving mother who believed that things should not remain unequal — and that you can’t be scared when you’re dancing." - Los Angeles Times
"Even at the height of the Cold War, ballet tours were seen as a bridge between the USSR and the West. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its foreign tours were cancelled, its stars are no longer invited abroad and choreographers ... have disavowed the company." - Euronews (AFP)
The crusading lefty investigative magazine profiles Royal, a principal dancer at ABT and one of the still-all-too-few Black stars of classical ballet. The marquee pull quote: "We have to break ballet out of the 18th century." - Mother Jones
Igor Zelensky, 52, former principal of the Mariinsky and New York City Ballets, resigned last month as artistic director of the Bavarian State Ballet after refusing to denounce the invasion of Ukraine. He's reportedly the partner of Putin's second daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, and they have a five-year-old daughter. - The Moscow Times
With rumors flying of Vladimir Putin's deteriorating health, it could happen: going back to the earliest days of Soviet television, the unscheduled appearance of the Tchaikovsky ballet on the airwaves meant something extremely serious, like the death of the leader (or, in 1991, an attempted coup). - Newsweek
