Ballet

Amid allegations that Sacheen Littlefeather faked a Native American identity for more than 50 years, others have come forward to offer examples of how the late Bay Area activist obscured, embellished or fabricated details about her life, including her purported work with dance pioneer Michael Smuin on one of his most acclaimed ballets. Paula Tracy, the ex-wife and former dance partner of Smuin, who died in 2007, said in an email shared with this news organization that Littlefeather exaggerated her participation on his…

For Carlisle Martin, a dance-obsessed girl growing up with her mother in Ohio, an annual fortnight with her father and his boyfriend in their Greenwich Village home exuded impossible glamour. Stepping through Robert and James’s front door was her “favourite entrance to perform”, and life within – full of art, beauty and flatteringly age-inappropriate conversation – felt like a ballet. Then, one summer in her early 20s, Carlisle found herself banished from their world.She hasn’t seen either man in almost two decades, and…

After Martin Kemp had two brain tumours removed, people kept teasing him. “A few of my friends said: ‘I don’t know what they’ve done but they’ve put something in, instead of taking something out. They’ve put intelligence in, Mart.’” He is laughing. “Making light of it,” he says. “But all I mean is: we all learn at different parts of our lives.” Kemp turned 61 last month, and is very much still learning and creating. He took up writing in the late 1990s as part of his psychological recovery from those tumours, and next…

Ahead of the launch of Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope, Ubisoft has shared a track from the game with NME – which you can listen to below. ‘Icy Battle Ballet’ was created by composer Grant Kirkhope for Sparks Of Hope, and you can listen to the track below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmgxx5rOUu0 Speaking to NME, Kirkhope shared that he was “super happy” with how ‘Icy Battle Ballet’ turned out and described it as “my kind of John Williams, Home Alone-y thing.” “Mostly I’ve drawn from John Williams, just because he’s…

Beyoncé was a proud sister this weekend after Solange made her historic debut as a composer for the New York City Ballet.On Instagram, the “Renaissance” artist shared a photo of the “Cranes in the Sky” hitmaker beaming while juggling two large bouquets of flowers at the dance company’s annual fall fashion gala last week. In the caption of her post, Beyoncé congratulated Solange on becoming the first Black woman to compose music for the New York City Ballet.“My beloved sister, there are no words to express the pride and…

This collection of Leonard Cohen’s early fiction – a novella and 15 short stories, plus a play script – was all written between 1956 and 1961, before Cohen really thought of himself as a songwriter or performer. He didn’t release his first record until 1967, when he was 33. The bulk of the pieces might be classified as unpublished juvenilia except, of course, that the composer of Famous Blue Raincoat and Hallelujah was never wholly young and free of care.The title piece, written when Cohen was 22 and doing postgraduate…

Long before he wrote Famous Blue Raincoat or Last Year’s Man, Leonard Cohen already knew – with painful exactness – who he wanted to be. In a short story dating from 1957, collected here for the first time, he details his 13-year-old self’s “heroic vision” of a charismatic future persona: “I was a man in the middle-twenties, raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of…

Solange Knowles is pulling up a seat to the table for the New York City Ballet’s annual fall fashion gala.On Monday, the prestigious dance company announced that it had commissioned a ballet score for the event created by the Grammy-winning musician, who goes by Solange. According to NBC News, the “A Seat at the Table” artist has made history as the first Black woman to compose music for the New York City Ballet.A “very excited” Solange also shared the news Tuesday on Twitter. Set to the “Cranes in the Sky” hitmaker’s…

In late 2016, Manish Chauhan and Amiruddin Shah, two Navi Mumbai kids from poor families, secured scholarships to one of the world's most prestigious ballet schools in the US, less than three years after they started learning the dance form. It's an extraordinary true story. And in mid-2017, Sooni Taraporevala — best known for co-writing or writing the Mira Nair films, Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake — presented it in 360-degree video with the short documentary, Yeh Ballet. Now less than three years later, Taraporevala is…

The interacting galaxy pair NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 take center stage in this image from the Dark Energy Camera, a state-of-the art wide-field imager on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. NGC 1512 has been in the process of merging with its smaller galactic neighbor for 400 million years, and this drawn-out interaction has ignited waves of star formation and warped both galaxies. Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image…