RUTH LEON RECOMMENDS… Alastair Macaulay’s online dance series

Alastair Macaulay’s online dance series
Click here to watch – Free

City Center’s series of online dance-coaching sessions, curated by Alastair Macaulay, former Chief Dance Critic of the New York Times, resumes with a focus on male dancers from a range of genres, coming from four continents and the UK. The first episode – they’re each available free for nine days – will be released on May 18 and will feature Ib Andersen (Danish leading dancer/choreographer, a favourite of George Balanchine who created many roles for him at NY City Ballet) coaching Calvin Royal 111 (Principal Dancer, American Ballet Theater) in Balanchine’s Apollo.

These are fascinating sessions for ballet lovers, isolating and emphasising the finer points of ballet’s painstaking technique as the dancers strive for perfection. Sometimes it’s just the tiniest adjustment of foot placement by an inch or two, but it matters.

Dance films and computer programmes notwithstanding, this is the way ballet has always been taught, passed on directly from dancer to dancer, in person, with corrections immediately offered and just as immediately, incorporated. Only now it’s possible to do it online.
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For those less familiar with ballet, you should know that Macaulay has gathered the very best current and former dancers as coaches for this series, to work one-on-one with younger performers now at the top of their game.

There are more sessions to be released by City Center on May 25, June 1, June 8, and June 15.

Read more here