April 18, 2011

Here’s an entertaining collaboration for your viewing pleasure - cellist Yo-Yo Ma and dancer Lil Buck caught on tape by Spike Jonze. Jonze explains:

The other day, I was lucky enough to be at an event to bring the arts back into schools and got to see an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and a young dancer in LA, Lil Buck. Someone who knows Yo-Yo Ma had seen Lil Buck on YouTube and put them together. The dancing is Lil Buck’s own creation and unlike anything I’ve seen. Hope you enjoy.

Fabulous interpretations – from both Mr. Ma and Lil Buck – of Saint-Saens’s The Swan. Love performances in intimate settings like this one.

Dancing on the Page: the art of scripting ballet →

November 5, 2010

Via utnereader:

“Ballet Austin, despite its modest size, creates top-rated dance. The man responsible is artistic director Stephen Mills, one of the country’s top young choreographers of contemporary ballet. Troupes across the country have performed his Hamlet, set to music by Philip Glass. I was listening to Mills talk about his new Firebird at a preview event when I began to wonder how he records his choreography. Then I watched as a ballerina took to her toes, leaned hard to the right, swept her arms behind her, cocked her head even farther to the right, strained her eyes to the left, and then ran in a half circle across the stage. How do you write that down? I just used 40 words to describe three seconds of dance.”

June 17, 2010

Today’s diversion – Architecture meets dance :: Calatrava at New York City Ballet

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava designed four new sets, including this one, for NYCB’s Architecture of Dance festival, under way through June 27.

The Washington Post’s culture critic Philip Kennicott notes some interesting aspects of the experience on Calatrava:

After opening night, Calatrava said something remarkable about his experience with the company. He enjoyed the collaboration, of course. But he was also deeply impressed by the old-fashioned narrative and symbolic aspects of ballet. In other words, he seemed to have engaged with the very things that many critics would say he has banished from his architectural work, which is consistently white, orderly and abstract. The world of ballet enticed him with things that are messy, ornamental, human and histrionic. When asked if this will affect his architecture, he said yes. That could be a radical change in direction for the architect.