According to the National Ballet of Cuba, Alicia Alonso, the prima ballerina assoluta and founder of what would become the National Ballet of Cuba, passed away on October 17th, 2019 at the age of 98.

For The New York Times, Jack Anderson wrote, “A ballerina of unusual range and power, she continued to dance into her 70s despite chronic vision problems.”

Celebrated both in her home country of Cuba and around the world, Alonso was a choreographer and leader as well as a famed dancer, and will be remembered long after her time on this Earth.

Read more about Alonso in The New York Times.

By Alison Starling/ABC7 News

11 October 2019

WASHINGTON (ABC7) — The Washington Ballet Theatre officially opens its new season in October. At the helm of the company is a woman who is known as one of the premier dancers in America, Julie Kent.

The Washington Ballet is not performing Swan Lake until April, but rehearsals are well underway.

In command of each move and magical step is Julie Kent, the artistic director for the Washington Ballet. But for nearly 30 years, she was captivating audiences with the American Ballet Theatre in New York. She was its longest-serving ballerina and principal dancer for more than 20 of those years.

Kent tells ABC7, “I think it was the greatest gift and greatest privilege to spend your life doing something that you love.”

Watch the video here.

By Natalie de la Garza

16 October 2019

It’s a good time to be performing the great Martha Graham’s choreographic masterworks. But according to Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, that wasn’t always the case.

“There were a few decades in there where they were just old,” says Eilber. “But they are now old enough and they’ve proven themselves enough to be called classics.”

If you are one of the few who hears “classics” and expects the company to appear on stage with horns and a breast plate when they finally return to Houston after 15 years, well, you’ll be disappointed. With The EVE Project, Eilber says they are honoring Graham’s legacy of innovation through a theme that highlights Graham’s “revolutionary approach to female characters on stage.”

Read the full article in The Houston Press.

By Sheila Regan

12 October 2019

The first flakes of snow that fell on the Twin Cities on Friday night didn’t seem to stop Minnesota Dance Theatre from bringing a bit of spring to their fall concert. The company’s repertory piece, “Boccherini Dances,” choreographed by late founder Loyce Houlton in 1984 to the courtly music of Luigi Boccherini, feels like a spring romp.

The piece requires huge amounts of technical skill from the three pairs of dancers performing it, while also emitting a graceful airiness. Boccherini’s music has a complex structure, with lots of repetition and variation, as does Houlton’s choreography. It’s satisfying to watch the three pairs diverge, switch partners, and come back again, with each pair getting moments to shine with dazzling lifts and falls. There are a couple of times when the three male performers dance together, all of which are quite fun.

MDT’s fall season features two world premieres. The first is “The Gateless Gate,” by Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, who shows herself adept at molding groups of bodies in movement in the Lab’s vast space, and at playing with tempo, juxtaposing moments of slow motion and stillness with sudden sprinting breaks.

Read the full article in The Star Tribune.

By Roslyn Sulcas

11 October 2019

LONDON — Seven dancers, their backs to the audience, heads turned in profile, move on to the stage in silence, stepping to the left on a bent leg, then ceremoniously curving the right leg forward. Arms interlinked behind backs, the women in soft draped dresses, they look like ancient figures on a Greek vase. The music begins: not ancient at all, but jagged, abrasive strings. A lone man appears. He is performing the same sequence, but facing forward.

Pam Tanowitz’s “Everyone Keeps Me,” a new work for the Royal Ballet that premiered here on Thursday, has begun, and for 20 entrancing minutes, we are in her strange, resonantly poetic world.

The dance critic Edwin Denby once wrote that “the strange thing about making pieces that have no logical narrative or logical formal structure is that it needs an exceedingly dramatic gift.” He was talking about Merce Cunningham, but that’s true too of Ms. Tanowitz, a choreographer who labored quietly at her craft for decades and now is suddenly in demand everywhere. In the last year, she has created pieces for the New York City Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Paul Taylor Company, among others.

Read the full article in The New York Times.