Dance

“‘I started doing this because of the girls who came to us in a state of silence. They were raped at a young age and they didn’t know how to express themselves. They were so withdrawn,’ said [dance teacher Amina] Lusambo. Now the same women line up in brightly coloured leggings for her classes, where they learn to reconnect with their bodies. ‘You can do more in one month of dance than in three months of psychotherapy,’ Lusambo said.” – Reuters

The last time I felt such a sense of release watching dancers spill onto the streets in a movie was in “Fame.” – The New York Times

“The empty, dark dance floor at the Viruta Tango Club is a symbol of the pandemic-induced crisis facing dancers and musicians of an art form known for close physical contact and exchanging partners. … Equally damaging has been the closing of borders, preventing the arrival of tourists, the main source of financing for the local tango industry. Tango tours abroad have also been canceled as Argentina continues to suffer high coronavirus caseloads more than a year after the pandemic began.” – AP

“Particularly noted for her narrative work, … Marston will take over as new Ballet Director and Chief Choreographer for an initial period of two years, starting from the 2023-24 season. … Marston has previous directorship experience in Switzerland, having been Ballet Director at the Konzert Theater Bern from 2007-2013. There, she created several world premieres including Wuthering Heights (2009), and led the ballet from the brink of closure to a flourishing period of ensemble work.” – SeeingDance

Daniel Riley, who comes from the Wiradjuri people of central New South Wales, spent 12 years dancing with and choreographing for Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australia’s (and possibly the world’s) most prominent indigenous dance company. At the beginning of 2022, he starts work as artistic director of the company’s oldest contemporary dance troupe, the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre. – ABC (Australia)

Watching audience members take to the stage of a Washington theater for a “milonga” — a gathering to dance the tango — one observes a moving milestone in the ending of the drought of human contact. – Washington Post

“Switzerland’s prestigious Béjart Ballet Lausanne company faces a probe as allegations of drug use, harassment and abuse of power raise the question why nothing apparently changed after an earlier investigation raised similar issues. … The Maurice Béjart Foundation announced the audit just a week after revealing that the affiliated Rudra Béjart ballet school had fired its director and stage manager and suspended all classes for a year due to ‘serious shortcomings’ in management.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

It’s impressively intimate: “As you stand in the middle of an undulating semi-circle of bodies, each moving with snakelike ports de bras, you discover how eye contact can change the tenor of a performance. By its very design, VR dance is meant to be this visceral. The audience is but a hair away from the action, and occasional trips and slides, and the intricacies of choreography and gesture. Pickett describes the experience as akin to ‘having the movement land on your skin’.”  – Financial Times

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 [my] 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

“[This new report finds] 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 must grant that New York City Ballet is three times the size of the country’s next largest company, San Francisco Ballet.) – Dance Data Project

“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 two things we are demonstrating. One, the notion of telling our own story, but also that my dancers are versatile and can do the work of Wayne McGregor as well as Rennie Harris as well as Alvin Ailey. … I talk about works that have to do with social justice, but even a love duet is a revolutionary act.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

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. … [The] production pairs seven dancers, all female-assigned or of femme experience, with an imaginative framing concept: They are competing to play Giselle, and confronting all the oppressive demands such a canonical role entails. Performers portraying a host and judges round out the audition-style proceedings.” – The Washington Post

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 his dancers and creating work that celebrates life and wonder. – The New York Times

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. – Dance Magazine

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 Bread, a food recovery program; taught dance healing techniques to professional and novice dancers; and produced Musings on the Passing Scene, a series of bi-monthly articles.” And she’s never stopped moving her body. – San Francisco Classical Voice

“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 said. It took Manuel Liñán, the subject of Flamenco Queer, to change her mind.” (video) – The New Yorker

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 have started to change. – The New York Times

“[After 18 years,] 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 and lifelong passion: dancing.” – BBC

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

An investigation reveals psychological abuse, abuse of power, nepotism, and “serious pedagogical dysfunctions” at the Rudra Béjart School, “leading the Board to terminate the contract of the director, Michel Gascard and his wife Valérie Lacaze, manager of the school.” (Article in French; translation available using Google Translate.) – FranceInfo

Leslie Cuyjet has recently created a dance “so conceptual and personal. Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen — who curate Dance and Process, an incubator that affords choreographers the space and time to develop work — were impressed. Evans said she admired the nuances of seemingly simple gestures in the piece, as well as its ‘delicate shifts,’ which ‘contain all the complexity that I think is within Leslie as a person and as a performer: the subtlety, the control, but also the anger, the rage, the freedom.'” – The New York Times