Man, 37, said to be killed by falling decor in set change during Rimsky-Korsakov opera
A performer at Moscow’s renowned Bolshoi theatre was killed on Saturday in an accident on stage during an opera, the theatre said.
The Bolshoi, one of Russia’s most prestigious theatres, said the incident occurred during a set change in Sadko, an opera by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Continue reading...In her new memoir, New York City Ballet’s first Asian-American soloist speaks out about racism and sexual bullying in ballet. Now she wants to overhaul the industry from within
When Georgina Pazcoguin was 19 years old, she went to see a doctor about her thighs. A dancer at the New York City Ballet, Pazcoguin had previously had what was known among dancers as “the fat talk” with the company’s then leader, Peter Martins. During their meeting Martins had told her she didn’t “fit in”, silently indicating the area between her backside and her knees. And so, following a recommendation from a friend, she visited the office of one Dr Wilcox, who told her she should consume no more than 720 calories a day – the recommended number for the average woman is closer to 2,000 – and gave her some sealed packets of powder. For the next four months, she subsisted on the powder, plus a single chicken breast and two pounds of spinach or lettuce, which would make up her evening meal.
“No one wants to be told their body is insufficient,” says Pazcoguin, now 36. “I mean, line is essential in my business; there is a certain aesthetic [that is expected]. But I am not an ectomorph. As a dancer you are staring at your body all day long in a mirror. But to try to intimidate me to make me look like this stick figure? Some women are just born a particular way. And there [should be] flexibility within the ballet world for more body types than just this waif-thin idea.”
Continue reading...Photographer Tommy Trenchard documents students whose stories of transformation at the Hogwarts of South Africa are more than just fairytales
To fans of JK Rowling’s books, the story may sound somewhat familiar: a young boy living in difficult circumstances is enrolled in a mysterious school far from home, where his life is changed for ever by the transformative power of magic.
Anele Dyasi’s story is no fairytale, though, and the school in question is not Hogwarts, but the College of Magic in Cape Town, a unique institution that has been training some of the continent’s most skilled illusionists since the 1980s.
Continue reading...Moulin Rouge performed a full dress rehearsal two days ahead of the reopening of the cabaret following an 18-month closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Moulin Rouge and Le Lido, emblems of the crazy Parisian nights since 1889, will open again on 10 September.
Continue reading...The Russian star brings his take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Proms, having recently torn the piece apart with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. He explains his new, ‘tree-like’ twist
“Like climbing an infinite stairway, one step at a time.” That is how Pavel Kolesnikov describes working on JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the outstanding releases of last year. On Friday 10 September, he will perform them at the penultimate night of the Proms.
“I’ve never had the chance to dedicate so much quality time to a piece before,” he says when we meet in a tiny cafe in central London. The city has been home since the Siberia-born Kolesnikov, now in his early 30s, came to study at the Royal College of Music. He had grown up listening to recordings of the Goldbergs by Glenn Gould and Rosalyn Tureck, but had never considered performing them himself – “I did not feel I had anything to add”.
Continue reading...The choreographer felt the urgent need to bring happiness and relentless fun to the weekender she has curated for the Southbank Centre’s Summer Reunion series
‘With the year we’ve had, we just needed people to have insanely, intensely engrossing, almost relentless fun,” says choreographer Jade Hackett of the weekender she has curated for the Southbank Centre’s Summer Reunion series. Working with music producer DJ Walde under the umbrella of ZooNation dance company, Hackett is taking over the Thames riverside terrace for a free mini festival, three days celebrating UK hip-hop culture, and just celebrating full stop, having been starved of live shows and social occasions during the pandemic.
“It’s the first stepping stone to reintegration, bringing people together in a really safe way,” she says. “We’ll kick it off with music by Afrika Bambaataa, Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, that’s the vibe; awesome social dances, the electric slide, Soul Train lines, it’ll be super fun.” Audiences can watch dance battles and performances from the likes of female popping collective AIM and Afrobeats dancers HomeBros, but there’s an emphasis on participation, with a series of workshops covering dance from the 70s, 80s and 90s as well as newer styles such as Litefeet. There are daytime family activities and evenings dancing to DJ collective The Midnight Train playing garage, grime, house, R&B, hip-hop and soca – a little carnival fix for those feeling the gap left by the cancellation of Notting Hill carnival for the second consecutive year.
Continue reading...The dance that depends on what Covid prevents – close physical intimacy – is not only a cultural passion but also now a threatened source of income for many workers. Photographer Anita Pouchard Serra, with support from the National Geographic Society, has been documenting how dancers are surviving the crisis
In a pretty little plaza next to a railway track, there is proof that not even a pandemic can keep us apart.
Five couples lean in, cheek to cheek, marking steps that mirror the circuitous route of life. If there is a map, it rises out of a portable speaker, and the melancholic poetry of a tango.
Continue reading...Artists from traditional communities and new wave performers to come together online for the country’s first drag conference
Two years ago, in early June 2019, a young man stepped on stage at a small cafe in the south Indian city of Hyderabad to sing Lady Gaga’s hit song Born This Way. He had chosen that song for the line “don’t be a drag, just be a queen” because this would be his first public performance as a drag artist. He had expected no more than a handful of people to turn up for this show with two other drag artists, but as the evening progressed, the cafe filled with more than 500 people. In a conservative city like Hyderabad, that was a huge surprise.
It has been a long journey for Patruni Chidananda Sastry, who began to learn classical Indian dance at the age of five. Now 29 and working as a business analyst, he performs Tranimal – a postmodern drag concept born in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s – and more conventional drag using the avatar of SAS (Suffocated Art Specimen – how he describes himself). On 25 June he is organising the first drag conference in India, as part of Dragvanti , his online initiative to bring together drag artists from across the country.
Continue reading...With the touch of a button, a Sydney Opera House audience rewrites Shakespeare as it is performed in front of them
On Sunday, as part of the Sydney Opera House’s UnWrapped series, a group of dancers “remixed” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by way of an Australian storytelling technology, Omelia. A product built to shuffle characters and events and generate narrative possibilities in real time, dancers using it brought a new version of the classic tragedy to life. The one-off production, R+J RMX, was filmed for the Opera House’s streaming platform.
The “remix” was interactive: audience members were sent to a website where they could restructure the play with the touch of a button, while on stage narrators and dancers ran through numerous renditions of the story.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to dancer who left Royal Ballet a year ago amid allegations of sexual misconduct
Liam Scarlett, the internationally renowned choreographer, has died at the age of 35, a year after leaving the Royal Ballet amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour.
The cause of death has not been disclosed.
Continue reading...Plummeting audience numbers fuel calls for government assistance as famed tablaos struggle to survive
A little after 7.30pm on Wednesday night, a small crowd gathered in a dark, brick-lined bar in central Madrid to sit at candlelit, socially-distanced tables and lose themselves for an hour in the sweat, shouts and blurred hands, hems and heels of a flamenco show.
The 16 people in the audience at the Cardamomo tablao, or flamenco venue, were in luck – but then so were the eight performers on stage. Neither flamenco’s iconic place in Spanish culture nor its global status as part of Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity has spared it the pains and penalties of the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...She was told there was no room for a ‘brown swan’ in the London Festival Ballet, so she went to the US. There she found enormous success, dancing for everyone from Michael Jackson to Prince
The turning point in Julie Felix’s career came in 1975. A student at Rambert ballet school in London, she was selected to dance in Rudolf Nureyev’s production of Sleeping Beauty with the London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet). Nureyev was the god of British ballet – and he lived up to his reputation on the first day of rehearsal, Felix recalls. “He was late, but everybody said he was always late. All of a sudden, the doors flew open and in he came. He was well renowned for these big boots he used to wear, and a big fur coat. He took the coat off like a matador and threw it so it slid across the dance studio floor. Everybody jumped up and stood to attention. He was there for probably about half an hour.” At the time, 17-year-old Felix was awestruck. In hindsight, half a century later, she is less impressed: “Talk about unprofessional.”
In the fairytale version of Felix’s life, having acquitted herself on stage with Nureyev, she would have joined the London Festival Ballet and become the first Black British dancer to begin her ascent through the ranks of a British ballet company. Instead, she was told she was a “lovely dancer”, but was not going to be given a contract, “because of the colour of my skin. I would mess up the line of the corps de ballet, because you can’t have a whole row of white swans and then there’s a brown one at the end.”
Continue reading...Juggling babies and a job is always difficult – what are the particular pressures for performers and how is the industry taking steps to improve?
Followers of Royal Ballet principal Lauren Cuthbertson cheer ardently for her Juliet, Manon and Sugar Plum Fairy, but are in raptures about her latest role, as mum to baby Peggy, born in December and already the toast of Instagram. Cuthbertson is one of a flurry of dancers at the Royal who are about to give or have recently given birth, in a serendipitously timed lockdown baby boom.
It’s a long way from the early days of the company, when founder Ninette de Valois set the tone. “‘You’re pregnant darling, goodbye!’ That’s how it was,” says Jeanetta Laurence, a dancer in its touring company in the 1960s and 70s. Even now, she says: “It’s hard to think of another industry where having a baby is so intrusive to the work. I’m in awe and wonder at how they manage it.”
Continue reading...The Suede frontman on his latest musical discoveries, the brilliance of Michael Clark and the enduring appeal of mudlarking by the Thames
Born in Sussex in 1967, Brett Anderson founded alternative rock band Suede in 1989 with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann and childhood friend Mat Osman. Billed by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain”, Suede released five albums including their self-titled debut and Coming Up, before disbanding in 2003. Anderson went on to front the Tears and release four solo albums. In 2010 Suede reformed and released a further three albums, the latest of which is 2018’s The Blue Hour. Anderson will perform with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra as part of the Gŵyl 2021 festival, 6-7 March.
Continue reading...Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown
There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.
Continue reading...‘We had giant models made of our heads and got dancers to do it looking like us’
When I auditioned for Steps, we had to dance to a demo of 5,6,7,8. I remember thinking: “Thank God it’s a line dance.” I wasn’t a trained dancer and learning a proper routine would have probably scuppered my chances. But, after the management told me I’d made it, they said: “That’s going to be the first single.” I was like: “Oh no!” Line-dancing was something your mum did. I was 19 and wanted to go clubbing.
Continue reading...Chloé Lopes Gomes claims she was repeatedly told she did not fit in because of her skin colour
The first black female dancer at Berlin’s principal ballet company has accused the institution of racial harassment, claiming she was repeatedly told she did not fit in because of her skin colour.
Chloé Lopes Gomes, a French citizen, who joined the Staatsballett as a corps de ballet member in 2018, said she had faced recurrent racial abuse from her ballet mistress. In an interview with the Guardian she also accuses the company of institutional racism after managers failed to act even after various incidents were brought to their attention.
Continue reading...The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood
You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.
Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.
Record of ballerina with young dancers in 1972 found in Royal Academy of Dance archives
She was one of the greatest ballerinas who ever graced the stage, revered for her musicality, artistry and technical perfection. Now previously unseen footage of Dame Margot Fonteyn instilling the joy of dance in young children has been discovered, to the excitement of historians and ballet enthusiasts.
Footage of Fonteyn with young girls taking their first steps in ballet was found in the archives of the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) and will receive its first public screening at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London from Wednesday.
Continue reading...Music’s primal power for those living with dementia has inspired thousands of YouTube views for a clip of a former dancer
We see a frail and elderly woman in a chair, her eyes downcast. She motions for the music to be turned up, a swelling melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and with a little encouragement her hands begin to flutter. Then suddenly her eyes flash and she’s Odette the swan queen at the misty lakeside, arms raised. She leans forward, wrists crossed in classic swan pose; her chin lifts as if she’s commanding the stage once more, her face lost in reverie.
The woman in the film is Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former ballet dancer who died in 2019, the year the video was shot. But the clip has gone viral since being posted recently by Spanish organisation Música Para Despertar (Music to Awaken), which promotes the value of music for those living with Alzheimer’s. Many of the details accompanying the video on its journey around the internet have been erroneous. Marta Cinta was not a member of the “New York Ballet” (there’s no such company) or the actual New York City Ballet, but seems to have run her own dance company in the city; the ballerina performing in the intercut video is not her but Ulyana Lopatkina, who is not even dancing Swan Lake but Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan. Yet none of that takes away the impact of watching someone seemingly light up and have their memories unlocked by the power of melody. It’s as if you’re seeing Saldaña inhabit her true self.
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