The company is alleged to use underage student performers to work on and off stage for workweeks of well over 40 hours, with extremely busy touring schedules, for only nominal pay. - The New York Times
The Minneapolis-based company will shut down next March. "It’s the latest blow to the Twin Cities dance community, less than a year after ... Minnesota Dance Theatre announced in February it would pause its performing company, and the Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts went dark." - The Minnesota Star-Tribune
Shklyarov, a principal with the Mariinsky Theatre, fell from the fifth floor of a St. Petersburg building, “while on painkillers.” Federal authorities in Russia are investigating the death. - BBC
Late last spring, Donna Fay Burchfield, dean of the University of the Arts School of Dance, was as shocked as everyone else when she saw media reports that the Philadelphia school was closing. Here's how she found a new home for the UArts dance program in, of all places, rural Vermont. - Dance Magazine
"Union representatives of the Paris Opera Ballet are calling for the abolition of the internal promotion competition for dancers. For the first time, the annual examination, which allows dancers to reach the next rank in the hierarchy of the corps de ballet, has been partially postponed." - Gramilano
Vicky Holt Takamine, who has spent decades mastering and teaching hula and working to preserve native Hawaiian culture, has been awarded the 31st annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given each year to a 'highly accomplished figure' who has 'pushed the boundaries of an art form." - The New York Times
Though museums have long featured dance performances, today choreographers and companies are being given long-term residencies, exhibitions of their own with performance elements baked in, and site-specific installation pieces. - Dance Magazine
The troupe Chicago Moving Company has announced its closing, nine years after the death of founder Nana Shineflug. Meanwhile, Links Hall, a 46-year-old venue and a crucial performing space for emerging companies and artists, has launched a $350,000 "Lifeline for Links" crowdfunding campaign. - Chicago Tribune
A major ballet star in the 1980s and '90s, Bocca is probably Argentina's most famous living dancer. As of February, he becomes artistic director of the ballet at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. This was the third time he was offered the position. - The New York Times
Jamison was Ailey’s muse, as complicated as that word is, and she was able to bring his feelings, his ideas to life because of who she was. - The New York Times
Thanks to a major bequest from this past summer, the company — founded 18 years ago as a shoestring summer operation — has moved into a (slightly) larger venue, has a balanced $5.2 million budget, and gives its dancers an all-too-rare 52-week contract with livable pay and four weeks' vacation. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
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
"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
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
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
