dance

theartsdesk Olympics: The Golden Age

Ismene Brown Thursday, 19 July 2012

Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.

The Gods of Grace: When Sport is Beautiful

Ismene Brown Thursday, 12 July 2012

Faster, higher, stronger - and more graceful. There is a handful of top athletes and sportspeople who are the beautiful people, who have some divine extra dimension to their movement that makes you smile to see them. They're winners, but they're seraphic dancers too, and they make all the other winners look tough and effortful.

Opinion: What ballet school is for

Ismene Brown Friday, 30 March 2012

How many classical ballet dancing jobs, full-time, are there in Great Britain? I make it just 289. That's the Royal Ballet 94, English National Ballet 67, Birmingham Royal Ballet 57, Scottish Ballet 36, Northern Ballet 35. Rambert does sometimes take classically trained dancers: another 23. So, at a stretch, 312 full-time jobs for Britain's classical ballet graduates to be searching for a vacancy in.

Comment

From Foot to Foot, How Rhythm Travelled the World

Ismene Brown Sunday, 05 February 2012

Two hundred years ago in Durham taverns you could find men in wooden clogs clattering on the tables, with their mates pressing their ears to the underside of the surface. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, African slaves with bare feet were shuffling on dirt with metal bottle caps held between their toes. Now picture a Mediterranean gypsy dancing of sorrow and pain with swirling shawls and angrily pounding heels.

New Year Brantub - Free Tickets Competition

theartsdesk Thursday, 29 December 2011

Competition alert! Start 2012 with a surprise arts trip. On theartsdesk we love crossing the borders - "Surprise me," was the edict of the great impresario of theatre, music, art and dance, Serge Diaghilev, and it's one we hold to here, because we believe in the pleasure of surprises. So please enter our competition, and a pair of tickets to one of the splendid events listed below could be coming your way, but you will take pot luck with which one you win, and who knows?

Comment

theartsdesk Christmas Quiz

Ismene Brown Sunday, 25 December 2011

You're going to test your stomach and sweet temper to the maximum today - test your brain and memory too with our monster quiz about the arts covered by theartsdesk in 2011. Every artform is represented here in 12 dozen questions. Settle down between courses, films and presents and see how many you and your near and dear can do.

theartsdesk Christmas Quiz - Answers

theartsdesk Sunday, 25 December 2011

Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.

Christmas on theartsdesk: Brainteasers, Bran Tub, and the Best of 2011

theartsdesk Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.

DVDs for Christmas: Dance

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Ballet has had a difficult relationship with filming for a long time, not only as regards permissions and copyrights from all the people involved, but also in how to frame and light for film a spectacle and action conceived and judged for the stage, live before an audience of a thousand. Perhaps such things held the Royal Ballet back for decades, while the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov and the Bolshoi energetically set cameras rolling on their great stars and landmark productions.

Comment

theartsdesk Debate: Dance's Question Time

Ismene Brown Monday, 07 November 2011

What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers' training, choreographers' creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance world's leading figures was brought together by theartsdesk for a major debate last Friday in central London, as dance faced its own Question Time.