Wednesday, June 10

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Emilie Gerrity waits it out in Florida.

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Chasing her dream is like a steeplechase – always another hurdle to clear. After finishing school, she earned a one-year apprenticeship, then she was hired to join the corps de ballet in 2010. It took seven years – “a really long time,” she said – before she rose to soloist.

 

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A dancer cirulates a petition for race-inclusive dancewear and collects 300,000 signatures.

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In an interview with Good Morning America, Bell shared more of her experience with skin color-exclusive dancewear. "Only recently have efforts been made in the way of tights, leotards, ballet flats," she said. "Out of all my numerous pairs of tights that I've acquired over the years, I can honestly say only one or two match my skin tone and I got them this year." And pointe shoes — the subject of her post and the petition — are even farther behind, Bell added. It's already taxing for ballerinas to break in and wear out multiple pointe shoes a week; "having to pancake them on top of all that . . . it's ridiculous and could be avoided," she said.

 

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Grand Rapids Ballet releases another virtual performance.

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In addition to those performances, there will be a conversation with Artistic Director James Sofranko, Saunders and filmmaker and dancer Quinn Wharton, who did video editing on “Amiss.”

 

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Q&A with Marianela Núñez.

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Have you had any access at all to a studio or have you been holed up at home?

I have literally been at home, only allowed to do food shopping and go for a little walk. They eased up a bit and then there was an increase in cases, so they shut down again. Here we are heading into winter, the opposite from Europe, so with winter, there are usually more colds around which makes it harder. Also, we have the really poor neighbourhoods. They don’t have all the facilities like [clean, running] water; they are living right next to each other, so it’s harder to maintain the social distancing rules and keep it under control. In Argentina, we have twenty-four provinces and the biggest number of infections has been around Buenos Aires. It was big, but nothing like as big as Europe. The rest of the country is pretty much free, running back to the ‘new’ normal. I hate to say that it’s a ‘new’ normal, but it’s true.