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      South Korea’s Modern Dance Scene is Thriving

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      Thanks to government support — and a collaborative spirit among dance companies — the medium is thriving across the country.While the high-octane choreography in K-pop videos has helped define South Korea’s image globally, in the country itself, it’s modern dance that’s in the spotlight. It is a huge part of the country’s arts scene, quietly flourishing and influencing new generations of dancers and choreographers.Its popularity and reach are evident throughout the country, especially among the dozens of companies, in Seoul and other cities, that share dancers, choreographers and designers. And several of those companies are making a name for themselves internationally, performing abroad and inviting major names to choreograph in South Korea.This year’s Seoul International Dance Festival in September was a testament to the country’s dominance in the medium, with companies from Canada, Australia, Europe and, of course, Korea performing over two weeks. And several performances coming up later this fall display the country’s growing visibility on the global dance stage.Some dancers from the Korean National Contemporary Dance Company, which bills itself as the only government-funded national contemporary dance company in Asia, are to perform “Shut Up Womb” (Nov. 15-17), a revival of the 2021 dance by the Japanese choreographer Shimojima Reisa, at the Seoul Arts Center right around the same time some of the company’s other dancers are to perform “Jungle” in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 16-20, as part of a program celebrating South Korean culture.“Jungle” debuted in October 2023 in Seoul, and then traveled to Austria, France, Italy and Kazakhstan this summer. It will return to South Korea in November 2025 in a program that will also include “One Flat Thing, reproduced,” a dance by the celebrated American choreographer William Forsythe.For Kim Sungyong, the new artistic director of the company, this international touring speaks to the success of dance in his home country, and to the access to a variety of well-trained dancers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      From Salzburg to Paris, Dancing Bach’s St. John Passion

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      From Salzburg to Dijon to Paris, a German choreographer adds striking dance to the sacred oratorio.The first thing we hear in Sasha Waltz’s production of the “St. John Passion” (“Johannes-Passion”) is not the mournful opening notes of the sacred oratorio, written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1724, but rather the whir of sewing machines.Eleven dancers bend over a long table as they mechanically stitch together modest frocks. The chorus enters, with lacerating cries of “Herr, unser Herrscher” (“Lord, our Sovereign”), while the dancers slowly carry the billowy white garments that they have just made downstage, their naked bodies bathed in a golden glow. In a recent phone interview, Waltz referred to these frocks as “the shift of life, the cloth that represents, in a way, your own life, from birth to death.”Over the next two hours, the dancers repeatedly don these white gowns, slip into other, colorful garments, or perform in the nude as they bring Bach’s magisterial music to life, their movements enhanced by shimmering nocturnal lighting. For the most part, the set remains bare throughout the performance; the few props include wooden poles, blocks and planks, rope and mirrors.After springtime performances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria and the Opéra de Dijon in France, the production is to arrive at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in early November. Waltz, 61, is perhaps Germany’s best-known living choreographer, and the latest director of many who have been drawn to Bach’s two surviving passions — grand musical settings of the crucifixion of Jesus.“I think it’s very, very theatrical,” Waltz said of the “St. John Passion.” “It’s maybe the oratorio where Bach comes the closest to opera, I would say. And I love the rhythmicality of the turba choirs,” she added, referring to the highly charged crowd scenes.She was speaking days after receiving this year’s German Dance Award. The jury statement praised her “artistically unique and disciplinary-bursting oeuvre,” which has ranged from works staged in museums to operas, such as Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘You’re Basically on a Broadway Stage, With New Friends’

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      At the touring dance party Broadway Rave, the playlist is all show tunes. But don’t worry, no house remixes of “I Dreamed a Dream” here.Julia Cochrane drove for four hours, to New York from Boston, so she could spend last Saturday night immersed in all things Broadway. But not in Manhattan.Instead, she headed to Huntington, Long Island. There, over 100 people packed into Spotlight at the Paramount, a small bar attached to a concert hall, for a touring dance party called Broadway Rave, at which theater kids turned theater adults dance and sing onstage in between shots of tequila.“People who love this, they just want to come together,” said Cochrane, 22, who attended with her friend Hannah Opisso, 23, a Long Island resident who learned about the dance party via Instagram. “It’s like you’re basically on a Broadway stage, with new friends.”“You see these folks get onstage and have the courage to be up there,” said Ethan Maccoby, whose company presents Broadway Rave.Ye Fan for The New York TimesCochrane and Opisso met as students at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, where Broadway cast albums were their pregame music of choice. Last weekend, Broadway musicals brought them together again, and at one point they took the stage to sing “Meet the Plastics” from the “Mean Girls” musical.Attendees don’t have microphones — this isn’t karaoke — but they are encouraged to rush the stage to sing and dance when their favorite songs come on. And the term “rave” is a misnomer: The playlist is mostly uncut cast album material — though last weekend those theater fans may have caught the remix flair at the beginning of “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats.” Other songs that night included “Out Tonight” (“Rent”), “Popular” (“Wicked”), “Sincerely Me” (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and a few tracks from “Hamilton,” including “The Schuyler Sisters” and “Wait for It.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Keeping the Spirit of Harlem Dance Alive

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      Meet three women who are celebrating, and remixing, Black dance. Every image here of the dancers Ayodele Casel, LaTasha Barnes and Camille Brown is strikingly contemporary. All artists at the cutting edge of dance today, they regularly perform for rapt audiences. But if you were to cast their angled bodies, brilliant smiles and euphoric turns […] More

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      From Here to Eternity, a Choreographer Sinks Into the Sea

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      Faye Driscoll uses the ocean as her collaborator in a sunset dance celebrating the 10th anniversary of Beach Sessions.Faye Driscoll has been spending a lot of time at the ocean, in the ocean, with the ocean — watching it as it stretches into the horizon. What if, she wondered, instead of poisoning and polluting the ocean, we were able crawl inside it? To merge the water in our bodies with the water of the sea?For this summer’s iteration of Beach Sessions, a performance series at Rockaway Beach now in its 10th year, Driscoll was drawn, at first, to the choreography of beachgoers — swimming, lying on the sand, lugging their gear. She was also drawn to the lifeguards, decked out in bright orange. But then her gaze shifted.“What I really sunk into was the sea,” she said in a video interview from Rockaway, where she has lived this summer. “Just daily staring: looking at this vast horizon, this great mystery and feeling the sand and the wind.”“Oceanic Feeling” will be performed at Beach 106 at 6:30 p.m. to make use of the phases of twilight.On morning walks, though, she couldn’t ignore the plastic. “I think climate crisis is on all of our minds,” she said. “It’s not like I came here thinking, I’m going to make a piece addressing that” — and she hasn’t — “but I started thinking, what would it mean to put my body on the altar toward the ocean?”Driscoll, an experimental choreographer, has built a body of work embracing a primal, sensorial side of dance; in last year’s “Weathering,” dancers performed on a rotating platform, like a raft, on which they fought to survive, eventually morphing into a sculpture of flesh. In “Oceanic Feeling,” to be performed Saturday at Beach 106 at Rockaway beginning at 6:30 p.m., the dancers, succumbing to the elements — sand, water, wind — melt into one another.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bennington to Revive Dance Program of Philadelphia Arts School

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      Bennington College raised nearly $1.3 million to absorb the dance program of the University of the Arts, which shuttered suddenly in June.Two months after the University of the Arts in Philadelphia closed, the school’s dance program will be revived at Bennington College in Vermont, which will absorb the dance school, three staff members and nearly 50 students, the college announced on Thursday.“What they are doing is the future of dance,” said Laura Walker, the president of Bennington College, who helped raise nearly $1.3 million from philanthropists to make it happen. The money included a donation of $1 million from Barbara and Sebastian Scripps, who run a nonprofit focused on arts education.“It’s a tough time, and we hope this will be a model for others,” Walker said.Nearly 1,150 students and 700 employees were left adrift after the University of the Arts president, Kerry Walk, abruptly closed the school in June, citing financial woes, and then resigned. Soon after, Pennsylvania officials opened an inquiry into the unexpected collapse. Some faculty and students have joined class-action lawsuits accusing the school of fraud and breach of contract; a union representing workers also filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the university in July.Several universities have offered spots to incoming freshmen who had committed to the University of the Arts. Temple University in Philadelphia has also welcomed returning fine arts and drama students, some of whom were near graduation.But the agreement with Bennington College goes further: All incoming and returning students were invited to attend. Donna Faye Burchfield, the former dean of the University of the Arts School of Dance, will oversee the bachelor and masters of fine arts programs, with about 50 students. The program will also include a number of visiting dance artists who previously taught in Philadelphia.“On a Friday evening, we learned about the school closing,” Burchfield said. “On Saturday morning, I started making calls.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dance Leads the Way as Art Meets Sport at the Cultural Olympiad

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      A program of arts events shown in conjunction with the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games looks at the relationship between art and sport.In dance and in sports, there is a common ritual: warming up. As much an art as an activity, it energizes not just the body, but also the mind, speaking less to effort than to surrender. What does it take to get into the zone, that place where the body and mind show up as equals?Since 2022 France has been warming up — on a grand scale. Culture, along with sport and education, is a pillar of Olympism, and France has taken that seriously with its Cultural Olympiad, a program of multidisciplinary arts events directed by Dominique Hervieu, a choreographer, an experienced leader in the arts and a former dancer as well.The thread running through this Olympiad is the connection between sports and art. When do they find symbiosis? When do they diverge? As Hervieu sees it, what binds the Olympic Games is culture, and there, the dance values she embraces play a role: “It’s a way to think with your body,” she said in an interview in Paris. “To think about society, to think about individuality, to think about space.”In other words, to be aware of yourself in the larger world. The contemporary mandate for including a cultural component with the Games began in 1992 in Barcelona, Hervieu said. But how to integrate it is a choice made by the host city, and Hervieu decided on the sports-art connection.Dominique Hervieu is the director of the Cultural Olympiad, a vast program of arts events that began in 2022. “We have 2,500 projects, and it’s incredible,” she said. “It could have been only 500. And everybody would be happy with 500. Me too!”Benjamin BoccasThere are obvious similarities between the two — the idea of excellence and surpassing oneself — but Hervieu also wanted to “show that art is not sport and vice versa,” she said. “The dimension of physical performance, which is the goal of sport with a view to winning, is not the goal of art. This difference is fundamental, because virtuosity in art is always a means of creating a space for meaning or poetry.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Scandal Hits U.K.’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing,’ the Original ‘Dancing With the Stars’

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      The BBC said it would add chaperones to rehearsals after allegations of abusive behavior at a hugely popular dance show that inspired international versions.For almost two decades, viewers in Britain have watched celebrities jive, waltz and cha-cha-cha on “Strictly Come Dancing,” a BBC reality television show that inspired the international “Dancing With the Stars” franchise.The format, which has been licensed to 61 other territories including the U.S., pairs professional ballroom dancers with people who are famous in other fields, from athletics and acting to politics and journalism. The amateur dancers then train intensively with their professional partners and compete in weekly live performances.Introduced in 2004, the show quickly became one of the BBC’s most popular programs, widely loved as a glitzy, family-friendly watch on weekends.But in recent months it has grabbed headlines because of a growing scandal: allegations that two professional male dancers exhibited bullying or abusive behavior toward their female dance partners during rehearsals.One former contestant, the actor Amanda Abbington, has alleged in interviews with the British media that her dance partner, Giovanni Pernice, displayed “bullying” and “aggressive behavior” and was “abusive, cruel and mean.” She declined to give further details of the behavior in interviews, saying the ongoing nature of a BBC investigation into the allegations prevented her from doing so.Ms. Abbington, who appeared in the British series “Sherlock,” cited “personal reasons” last year for leaving the dance competition during filming, but said this week that she had flagged the behavior to producers before filing an official complaint with the BBC. She said she believed that there were 50 hours of rehearsal video that could bolster her case, though they have not been made public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More