In college, Beatrice Waterhouse started wondering where she could find information about Jews in the ballet world. So she created a Tumblr site, "'People of the Barre' (which, yes, is a play on 'people of the book') and started using the blog to store tidbits she came across about Jews in ballet, mainly for her own reference." - Forward
"I don’t want to keep riding with own Swan Lake or The Nutcracker – that’s fine, I love them, that made my career – but what else can I bring that speaks about me now? That’s why every time I do programming, I encourage choreographers and collaborators to go towards that direction." - The Stage
" that the position of Artistic Director is held by far more men than women, while the position of Executive Director is much more equitably distributed. However, in both Artistic and Executive Director roles, men are compensated at a higher rate than their female counterparts." (One prominent detail: Peter Martins earned way more than anyone else — though one...
"SOCIAL! the social distance dance club advertised a COVID-conscious rave this spring, where people were free to let loose together in the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall. David Byrne MC'd the evening's festivities, but the real dance happened before the party. The choreography was as follows." - The Brooklyn Rail
"The foundation is the experiences of African Americans in this country — and knowing that is not monolithic. Within the diversity in African American culture, people, and experiences, it's finding ways to engage to tell those stories that reflect the time in which we live. Not all choreographers I bring in are African American. That's important because there are...
Katy Pyle and her company, Ballez, have a new work called Giselle of Loneliness (click here if you don't get the reference) "that grapples conceptually with ballet's stringent and arguably exclusionary, conformist and outmoded traditional norms. … production pairs seven dancers, all female-assigned or of femme experience, with an imaginative framing concept: They are competing to play Giselle,...
During what we might call "the long 2020," choreographer Kyle Marshall experienced quite a bit of change. "In this next step of his career, he said, he’s more focused and more comfortable making decisions. But the pandemic made also him realize something else: Just how exhausted he was." Now he's trying to be more intentional, working more carefully with...
And it's not — not just — the Trocks and RuPaul's Drag Race. The latter, however, by its popularity and creativity, does seem to have created space for dancers and choreographers, even high-profile ones, to shake off the rigid gender expectations that have held sway in dance and to experiment with costuming, make-up, and gender-neutral movement and roles. -...
In her life, North, "the Bay Area-based dance therapist, writer, and flutist, has talked her way into a summer dance intensive camp, having had little formal dance training; sung in a gospel choir; played flute professionally; worked as a midwife; learned to play bass bamboo flute while living in India; written and published 11 books; birthed three children; founded Daily...
"When the journalist and filmmaker Ana González was growing up near Madrid, in the nineteen-nineties, flamenco seemed both ubiquitous and retrograde. For González, this exuberant style of dance and music, which emerged in southern Spain, represented a cloying brand of nationalism. 'I used to reject the conventional flamenco story, because I associated it with a very conservative tradition,' she...
Gay men aren't as ubiquitous in that world as some civilians think, but they're not rare. Yet gender norms in classical ballet are even more rigid for females than for males, and queer women in the profession have tended to feel very isolated indeed. That, however, is something that the hiatus and the move online caused by the pandemic...
" Lane and ABT parted ways last summer, although no announcement was made; rather, in September, her name was quietly taken off the roster. … She recently opened up to Pointe about her departure from the company, although for privacy reasons certain details are remaining undisclosed." (Hmm.) - Pointe Magazine
Eileen Kramer still dances every day. And she also "writes a story a day from her Sydney aged-care facility, publishes books and has entered Australia's most prestigious painting competition. After decades living abroad, Ms Kramer returned to her home city of Sydney aged 99. Since then, she's collaborated with artists to create several videos that showcase her primary talent...
The British choreographer, aged 35, died in April, one day after the Royal Danish Ballet announced it was cancelling its staging of his Frankenstein over #MeToo allegations against him; similar accusations led to his firing from London's Royal Ballet in 2020. The widespread assumption was that Scarlett committed suicide after the release of the news from Copenhagen; in fact,...
As a crowd marched in Bogotá against poverty and police violence, three twenty-something queer folks whose dance video had gone viral a couple of weeks earlier were urged by their fellow demonstrators to go right up to the riot police on the stairs at Plaza Bolívar and work it. And they did. - The New York Times
