Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
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.
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.
After just four years’ training in India and some fast crowd-funding, Kamal Singh joins English National Ballet School
Kamal Singh did not even know what ballet was when he turned up nervously at the Imperial Fernando Ballet School, in Delhi, during the summer of 2016. But the 17-year-old, known as Noddy, whose father was a rickshaw driver in the west of the city, had been transfixed by ballet dancers in a Bollywood film, and wanted to try it for himself.
Four years on Singh is now one of the first Indian students to be admitted to the English National Ballet school. He started this week.
The Cuban dancer talks about food rationing, what he ate at ballet school and his father’s terrible cooking
I always lived with rationing in Cuba – I was born in 1973. We used the term “the three musketeers” to mean rice, chicharos [split peas] and eggs, although at one point eggs disappeared completely.
I had two rabbits as pets and I arrived home from school one day and there was that smell I’d almost forgotten, of meat. Then I realised that Mamá had roasted my pets and I cried a lot. My mother pressed us to eat them and we all did. The rabbits tasted very good, obviously – I was a kid and I sort of got distracted. I was very sad, but I ate.
Dance Centre Kenya’s Christmas production of The Nutcracker, performed at the National Theatre in Nairobi with the Nairobi Philharmonic Orchestra and guest musicians from overseas, is a highlight of the capital’s cultural and social calendar
Austrian magazine alleges pupils were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse
The Vienna State Opera has launched an investigation and promised far-reaching reforms after allegations that students at its prestigious ballet academy were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse by two teachers.
“Things have happened that are unacceptable,” the State Opera’s director, Dominique Meyer, said on Wednesday after the Austrian magazine Falter published a detailed exposé of the alleged abuse based on interviews with students and staff.
Ballet and film complement each other perfectly in a biopic of the superstar dancer that captures life under Castro’s rule
Dance on film can have many functions. It might act as a showstopping decoration to the drama (most movie musicals), a shorthand for its protagonist’s obsession or madness (Black Swan, The Red Shoes) or a blunt tool for illustrating cultural difference (Step Up, Save the Last Dance and every other ballet-girl-meets-hip-hop-boy movie). But, aside from Jerome Robbins’ masterpiece West Side Story, it doesn’t often work as a narrative device – an alternative script. That’s how it functions in Yuli, a new biopic of Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta, by Spanish director Icíar Bollaín and writer Paul Laverty (I, Daniel Blake).
In Yuli (the title is Acosta’s father’s nickname for him), the concept sounds overcomplicated: a biopic played in flashbacks, mixed with real footage of the dancer on stage, framed by the conceit that “current” Carlos is creating an autobiographical dance piece in which he also performs as his own father. But it works. It really works.
If you went looking for a group of passionate changemakers on Friday night, they were probably at the United Nations. Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg turned the fourth floor of the U.N. into a powerfully casual celebration for the 9th annual DVF Awards, complete with small chocolate dessert towers and white lounge couches in lieu of traditional seats.
Male former aide to John Conyers says that 'Most of us have seen him in his underwear' and that it's not a 'big deal' after woman accuses the Rep. of partially stripping in his office Ice baths, a secret M&Ms stash and microphones hidden in their SHOES: Rockettes reveal what really goes on behind the scenes of their much-loved Christmas Spectacular One of the most iconic shows in New York City, the Rockettes' 84-year-old Christmas Spectacular, is right around the corner Astonishingly, the Rockettes do not actually hold each other during high kicks, but lightly brush the performers beside them with outstretched arms Their quickest costume change comes between the 'Parade of the Wooden Soldiers' and 'New York at Christmas', when the Rockettes have just 78 seconds The famous tapping sounds are not recorded, but there is a trick to make sure the audience hears them loud and clear One of the ... (more)
In a Friday, Nov. 17, 2017 photo, members of the Houston Ballet rehearse the Nutcracker at their studio, in Houston. The company will have to hold their performance at Smart Financial Centre and the Hobby Center this year, and giving 10 less performances than usual, because its home stage at the Wortham Theater Center was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey.
Mark Morris, as a teen-ager, in the seventies, did his longest and most serious dance training as a member of a Balkan folk-dance troupe, the Koleda Balkan Dance Ensemble, a semi-pro group of Seattle hippies and music geeks who got together on weekends, went to the woods, drank slivovitz, and danced till they dropped. When you see the sheer danciness of his work-the twirling, the leaping, the falling, the floor-smacking-Koleda, in large measure, is what you're seeing.
The English choreographer Matthew Bourne is known for ballets that are based on popular tales or movies; that pulsate with crime and passion; that transpire on shifting planes of reality; that incorporate big, crazy dance parties and small, nastily observed manners; and that generally end with the boy's not getting the girl, or the boy. Now Bourne has done it again, God bless him! His new ballet is "The Red Shoes" , and the story, basically, is that of the famous 1948 movie by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.