Hikaru Kobayashi, First Soloist of The Royal Ballet, by Rick Guest from his series What Lies Beneath

3 choreographers, 3 contemporary  ballets, 3 world premieres.  We’re back in the studio this week, changing gears and pedaling full speed into the new year with new music, new movement, and a refreshed ardor for creation.  A few Friday reads for you…

Why We Dance. (this short film by Ezra Hurwitz featuring Miami City Ballet made my morning!)

Okay, Audrey Hepburn en pointe totally did, too. (that expression, the port de bras! oh, to see what her ballet career might have been…)

How the arts add to urban economies. (specific and eye-opening)

Why I missed yoga after 2 weeks away. (my meditation time)

I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the epic retort from the Pennsylvania Ballet to a rather ignorant football fan. (“But what happened is a reminder of the emerging dominance of our city’s ballet company – and just how hard its dancers work to make the unnatural movements of an art form appear easy and elegant.”)

My inspiring friend Winnie. (who started a dance company in NYC a year out of college)

So inspired by Gaza’s only ballet school. (the healing powers of dance)

“I have tried to strip away the veneer of performance, to remove the masks of role, costume and stage. I wanted to see how their art has both shaped and etched itself into their bodies.”- Photographer Rick Guest on the images he created of dancers for his What Lies Beneath series, a book which is also the basis of a new exhibition at the Hospital Club in London. (see the “beautiful and brutal” portraits of dancers from The English National Ballet, The Richard Alston Dance Company, The Dresden Semperoper, and The Royal Danish Ballet, among others, with commentary from Rick Guest and Tamara Roji here)

This list has been circulating the internet, with good reason. (I enjoy thinking this way at the start of a “new” year- love #2 and #24)

Dance Advantage just did a roundup of the best blog posts from 2015 (you might see a familiar story in there)