If you’re an independent film maker then getting your hands on money to finance your project is hard, if you’re a dance film maker then getting your hands on money to finance your project is almost impossible. Unless of course you are a close personal friend of Anne Beresford or Portland Green but I digress. […]
If you’re looking for good ideas from the dance administration machine they are, like the mythical Scottish Haggis, hard to find. They do exist however and often times they are based on well worn ideas of old. Dance Umbrella, the annual dance festival based in London, has dusted off one such idea for their up […]
Christopher Wheeldon, the current poster boy of ballet, will be launching his company, Morphoses, in London this week at Sadlers Wells Theatre. For the last few months barely a word has been written about the wonder boy choreographer that has not been unrelentingly fawning. Were the press to be believed this is the second coming […]
Things must be very slow during the summer at Arts Council England (ACE) because the funding monolith has gotten all “FBI” and is “launching an inquiry” into just why there are so many US musicals in the West End of London instead of really boring British ones. Emma Stenning, the unfortunate ACE Special Agent officer […]
The saying goes; “numbers don’t lie”, unless you work for the United States Supreme Court and you want George Bush to be President that is. When we talk about dance the numbers are usually pretty small. Small companies, small audiences, small tours, small budgets. Sometimes the talent is huge but everything else is small, it’s […]
Far from taking the organising committee of the London Olympics (LOCOG) into the street and beating them down for even thinking of blowing £9.2billion on a 3 week long sports event, Arts Council England has, once again, dropped its trousers and bent over, metaphorically speaking of course. The latest banality comes from ACE’s website where […]
It’s no secret that here in TheLab™ we are not big fans of the Olympic Games. Sure, we enjoyed watching Cathy Freeman win the 400m in Syndney just like everybody else. If running around tracks is your thing then “have at it”. Just explain to us why it has to cost £9.2Billion and everything else […]
It’s tough being the Artistic Director of The Royal Ballet. The company is on autopilot churning out tedium on tap, Wayne McGregor is your resident choreographer but he’s never there and Christopher Wheeldon is trying to poach all your best dancers. So facing all of this stress is probably the single driving factor behind Monica […]
Dance is often described, usually in a whimsical tone of voice with folk music as accompaniment, as a “universal language”. Dance is a form of expression that transcends the spoken word, different cultures, religions, even continents are no obstacle to its communicative powers. You don’t need to speak French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, […]
It’s unusual for members of the dance fraternity to engage in open warfare, through the media, but that is what’s happening between Terry Dean Bartlett and Elizabeth Streb, the AD of Streb Extreme Action (yes, that’s really what the company is called!) Our European readers may be in the dark a little about just what […]