Ballet & Culture, Dance & Ballet News January 16, 2012

Water Dancers

We’ve often said that surfers are to waves what dancers are to music (or was it the other way round?), so we were extremely interested to read, on sports & lifestyle webzine Lupita, about surf brand Quiksilver’s new project, The Water Dancer.

The Water Dancer is a series of short films where Quiksilver ambassador and world champion Stephanie Gilmore meets and chats to different dancers to learn what inspires and drives them, discovering how their dancing relates to her own passion of surfing.

In the first episode she meets Tiler Peck, who has been dancing since the age of seven and is currently a principal dancer with New York City Ballet:

Stephanie also meets Noemie Lafrance, a Canadian choreographer & artistic director specializing in site-specific work for public space and urban architecture. Noemie has completed commercial video work with Apple and recording artist Feist, as well as performance pieces with architect Frank Gehry:

In the third and final episode of the series Stephanie talks to breakdancer Casandra “Defy” Rivera:

Water dancing is also, albeit in a different way, an element of Earthfall’s award-winning 2005 production of At Swim Two Boys, based on the novel of the same name by Jamie O’Neill, which arrives in London (Riverside Studios) next month.

Created by Jim Ennis and Jessica Cohen and featuring two male dancers plus two musicians, the story unfolds against a cascading wall of water that slowly fills the stage. You can see a clip of the production here.

We started The Ballet Bag in April 2009 with the mission to prove that ballet is not stuffy, old fashioned and inaccessible; that it is quite the opposite: relevant, fresh and topical. With the aim to Give Ballet a New Spin we try to show it under a different light. When writing our capsule biographies, ballet fact cards, review roundups and commentary on social media, we cross it over with other art forms and cultural references (pop culture, cinema, rock music – ie. other things we love!).

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