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[dirac]

A preview of the new series of "Strictly Come Dancing."

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Newcomer Darcey Bussell adds some sparkle to the Strictly Come Dancing panel as she joins her fellow judges for a spin round the floor -- in a mirrored, glitterball-style dress.

[dirac]

A review of the Mariinsky Ballet in "Cinderella" by Luke Jennings in The Guardian.

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All of this is evident in Cinderella. It's an uneven work which shows evidence of the choreographer's struggle to reconcile highly diverse elements. In Cinderella herself, danced on last Thursday's first night by Diana Vishneva, we have a traditional, lyrical ballerina heroine. The drop-cloth and steel-framed set suggests that she lives in a tenement – distant echoes of West Side Story – but her two sisters and stepmother (a wonderfully demented Ekaterina Kondaurova) are figures from modernist pantomime. The Prince (Igor Kolb), meanwhile, is a white-suited loner who occupies a kind of neo-masque realm which vanishes, like an architectural caprice, to perspective infinity.

[dirac]

Alan M. Kriegsman, former dance critic for The Washington Post, is dead at 84.

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Mr. Kriegsman’s career at The Post, from 1966 to 1996, coincided with an unprecedented cultural flowering spurred by federal arts funding and magnetic Soviet defectors such as Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev who excited audiences, Carbonneau said.

On the dance beat, Mr. Kriegsman attended major performances in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, but he also was egalitarian in his tastes. He covered Indian and Spanish folk dances and attended community performances by African drummers to give readers a broader sense of a vibrant dance culture.

[dirac]

Arts organizations in Yumareceive a grant from the state.

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Yuma Ballet Theatre board president Candice Orduno-Crouse said the grant will provide much-needed support as the dance organization prepares for its 33rd season. “Receipt of such funds represents the state of Arizona's continued recognition of YBT's long-standing tradition of bringing the joy of professional ballet and dance to the Yuma community.”

Carolyn Bennett, executive director for Yuma Fine Arts, said she is thankful not just for the arts commission's support but also for legislative representatives who voted to continue the commission as a state agency.

[dirac]

A review of the Australian Balletby Philippa Hawker in The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Robert Helpmann's The Display, from 1964, was the company's first fully Australian production, both for its creative team and its subject matter - its avian figure is a lyrebird, rather than a swan, and the mythology it examines is that of Australian masculinity. There is also a sense that there might be other aspects to consider in a contemporary performance, such as the disturbing impact of the figure of the other, and the enigmatic presence of the native bird.

Glen Tetley's Gemini, from 1973, was created for four dancers from the company by a choreographer who was changing the face of ballet: it might not now have the transforming power it had then, but its heady combination of the sculptural, sinuous and kinetic has an exhilarating immediacy.

[dirac]

A preview of Cincinnati Ballet's New Works Series by David Lyman in The Cincinnati Enquirer.

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This season, American ballet companies with budgets greater than $5 million will stage roughly 290 ballets. Of those works, just 25 of them are choreographed by women.

The only uplifting piece of the equation is that seven of those 25 pieces will be presented by the Cincinnati Ballet. If the company needed any rationale for focusing its season-opening New Works Series on female choreographers this year, you’ve just read it – the numbers are genuinely horrifying.

[dirac]

A review of the "Celebration of Dance" at the Chicago Dancing Festival by Leigh Witchel for danceviewtimes.

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From hip-hop in white to summer whites. Houston Ballet followed with Mark Morris’ “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” which felt even more pastoral outdoors. Made in 1988, this was Morris’ third ballet commission, and the work has the freshness of someone still exploring a medium. For the same reason, it’s still occasionally pedantic. Connor Walsh leads a duo by doing multiple pirouettes that finish with a leg balanced out to the side. He stops his momentum and then grinds himself around in a promenade, finishing by extending his leg high to the side. Morris makes him repeat this five or six times. Still, the dancers made the work clean and clear, including Walsh, long-legged Amy Fote, and Melissa Hough and her flashing turns.