Keenan Kampa is the coolest. Watch a video of her dancing onstage, and she radiates the loveliness of a classically-trained dancer. All effort and hard work is hidden beneath a veneer of calmness and grace honed from years of ballet training, and refined in the notoriously exacting Vaganova Academy in Russia. Offstage, she exudes another sort of coolness – an effortless, off-the-moment chicness of someone who marches to the beat of her own drum. One only need to look at her breadth of…
A gaggle of girls cluster around me in the dimly-lit photo studio, waiting for my instructions. Nastya and Sasha have to leave early. “So how about you sit and I shoot you wearing your pointe shoes,” I say. The two long-limbed young women in question pull out a fresh pair of satin pink pointe shoes apiece and sit against the white studio backdrop, shifting slightly as I reposition them. Their friends disappear down the corridor to a dressing room. One…
Google ‘Isabella Boylston’, and chances are that you’ll be presented with a list of Black Swan references. But really, it’s her white swan that’s had everyone talking. The dual role in Swan Lake was one Isabella had long dreamed of performing, and when the time came, her Odette was firmly in the limelight.…
For a time, Xander Parish seemed like the Jody Sawyer of the English ballet scene. Now, we are not saying that Xander has poor turnout or bad feet (have you seen his feet?), or that he called Ethan Stiefel a sucky boyfriend. But rather, his tenure at the Royal Ballet seemed more or less spent, as Jody said in Centre Stage, “in the back of a corps waving a rose back and forth”.…
We imagine what would happen if some of our favourite American dancers came together for a thanksgiving dinner. Silliness and bad photoshop ensues.…
This 30 minute documentary by Russia Today offers insight into the punishing world of that is Russian ballet.…