by Jacquelyn Thayer “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” was the quote that kept intruding upon me, quietly but insistently, while watching the debut of the Joffrey Ballet’s made-for-digital Boléro, a 16-minute piece choreographed by company artist Yoshihisa Arai and starring Anais Bueno, set to Maurice Ravel’s infamously repetitive composition. Not to…
by Jacquelyn Thayer Figure skating is a distinctive breed of Olympic sport, where subjective preference is in regular conflict with objective measurement. This shapes its perception among viewers — read any fan discussion to see how even a skater’s technical scores can easily become a topic of heated debate — but just as much its…
Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the most demonstrably versatile team in ice dance history, have also just laid claim to the title of most decorated skating team in Olympic history — a tally of two gold medals in the individual ice dance event and team event in PyeongChang brought their total across three Olympic…
by Jacquelyn Thayer There’s a form of lived choreography that any music lover will know intimately: you act on the rhythms of your personal soundtrack, attached to a playlist or the looped tunes in your own head. It informs the footsteps and fidgets, enhances triumph and trauma. It’s automatic. In Baby Driver, the trappings of…
Pasquale Camerlengo with Angelika Krylova and long-time students Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje at the 2014 World Figure Skating Championships. (Photo by Chris McGrath for Getty Images AsiaPac) by Jacquelyn Thayer Continuing our cutting room floor series, these insights from Pasquale Camerlengo were captured during a June 2015 interview. As a competitive ice dancer in…
by Jacquelyn Thayer Author’s Note: In summer 2015, I interviewed several top choreographers from the figure skating world for a feature in Dance International magazine’s Winter 2015 issue. Due to space limitations, some great insight was left on the cutting room floor — until now. In a new series, Moving in Measure delivers a closer…
Heather Ogden and McGee Maddox in The Four Temperaments (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann, courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada) by Jacquelyn Thayer Modes of modern form the surest throughline in the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed program featuring a pair of Balanchine classics and Alexander Ekman’s daring Cacti. While two pieces —…
by Jacquelyn Thayer Interview originally conducted in January 2015. Since opening their Motion Arts physical therapy and conditioning office in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Veronique and Peter Breen have seen the typical woes faced by any facility working closely with high-level athletes—like the greater Detroit area’s bumper crop of elite figure skaters. “There’s always the last…
by Jacquelyn Thayer For photographers of dance, the trick of creation comes in capturing the most active of arts in still form. The challenge is the addiction for Bill Frederking, professor of photography at Chicago’s Columbia College, where he has taught since 1983. Frederking, not a dancer himself, first stepped into the field in 1989…
by Jacquelyn Thayer The ballroom has served as the better part of life’s stage for Latin professional Ilya Ifraimov. Ifraimov entered the ballroom world as a teenager in Russia, tackling first the formation team discipline before transitioning into individual competition, a move that prompted a relocation to Israel in 1995 at the age of 18…
