External links
- Karine Saporta official site
- Karine Saporta interview from The Hindu
Karine Saporta is a French choreographer, dancer, photographer, and short film director. She is one of the most prominent figures in French dance.
Saporta was born in France to a mother of Russian ancestry and a Spanish father. She began dancing at the age of five, studying ballet at first, and attending the National Conservatory. She graduated with a degree in philosophy and a master's degree in sociology from the University of Paris, then traveled to the United States to study choreography and movement composition.
She founded the Compagnie Karine Saporta in order to redefine contemporary modern dance. Her choreography is influenced by Indian dance and urban/hip hop dance as well as other dance forms from around the world. She is also interested in improvisation.
She is a professor at the Art and Music Department of the University of Evry, president of the Dance Commission, vice-president of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers in France (SACD), and artistic director of choreographic performances at the Festival d'Avignon.
She became Director of the Centre Choreographic National (CCN) of Caen/Basse-Normandie in 1989. She choreographed the dances in the 1991 Peter Greenaway film Prospero's Books . She has also choreographed to music by Michael Nyman in her opera-ballet La Princesse de Milan .
She is a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.
Twyla Tharp is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
Dame Ninette de Valois was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing the Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.
Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer.
Michael Kidd was an American film and stage choreographer, dancer and actor, whose career spanned five decades, and staged some of the leading Broadway and film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Kidd, strongly influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Léonide Massine, was an innovator in what came to be known as the "integrated musical", in which dance movements are integral to the plot.
Jerome Robbins was an American dancer, choreographer, film director, theatre director and producer who worked in classical ballet, on stage, film, and television.
Bronislava Nijinska was a Russian ballet dancer of Polish origin, and an innovative choreographer. She came of age in a family of traveling, professional dancers.
Karole Armitage is an American dancer and choreographer currently based in New York City. She is artistic director of Armitage Gone! Dance, a contemporary dance company that performs several times annually in New York City as well as touring internationally. She was dubbed the “punk ballerina” in the 1980s. She earned a Tony nomination for her choreography of the Broadway musical Hair.
Susan P. Stroman is an American theatre director, choreographer, film director and performer. Her notable theater productions include Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers, The Frogs, The Scottsboro Boys, Bullets Over Broadway, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and New York, New York.
A dream ballet, in musical theater, is an all-dance, no-singing production number that reflects the themes of the production. The plot, themes, and characters are typically the same—although the people playing the characters may be different, as the roles of the dream ballet are usually filled by well-trained dancers rather than actual actors.
Glen Tetley was an American ballet and modern dancer as well as a choreographer who mixed ballet and modern dance to create a new way of looking at dance, and is best known for his piece Pierrot Lunaire.
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company begun in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. After its initial Paris season, the company had no formal ties there.
Ekaterina Sergeevna Maximova was a Soviet and Russian ballerina of the second part of the 20th century who was internationally recognised. She was a prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre for 30 years, a ballet pedagogue, People's Artist of the USSR and Russian Federation, winner of international ballet competitions, Laureate of many prestigious International and Russian awards, a professor in GITIS, Honorary professor at the Moscow State University, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, and an Executive Committee member of the Russian Center of Counseil International De La Danse, UNESCO
Lynne Taylor-Corbett is a choreographer, director, lyricist, and composer. She was born in Denver, Colorado.
Lucinda Childs is an American postmodern dancer/choreographer and actress. Her compositions are known for their minimalistic movements yet complex transitions. Childs is most famous for being able to turn the slightest movements into intricate choreography. Through her use of patterns, repetition, dialect, and technology, she has created a unique style of choreography that embraces experimentation and transdisciplinarity.
Blanca Li, originally Blanca María Gutiérrez Ortiz is a Spanish choreographer, film director, dancer, and actress.
Charonne Mose is a Canadian Emmy Award winning Choreographer, Webby Award winning Creative Director and dancer, who now resides in Washington, DC.
Colorado Ballet encompasses a 31-member professional performing ballet company, a studio company for advanced dance students, an academy, and an education and outreach department. Based in downtown Denver, Colorado, Colorado Ballet serves more than 125,000 patrons each year.
Françoise Adret was a French ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and company director.
Denise Faye Greenbaum is an American actress, dancer, choreographer, and director. She is the recipient of an American Choreography Award, as well as a Screen Actor's Guild Award for the 2002 film Chicago. Faye won the Dance Track Magazine Artist Award for best choreography in a feature film for her work in Burlesque. Additionally, she received nominations including the Fred and Adele Astaire Award and The World Dance Awards for her choreography in Burlesque.
Mariquita, often referred to as Madame Mariquita, (1838/40–1922) was an Algerian-born dancer who became a ballerina, and later a successful choreographer and ballet mistress at various theatres in Paris from the 1870s until 1920. Though best known for her work at the Opéra-Comique, where she was a trailblazer in modernizing French ballet during the 1900s and 1910s, Mariquita also staged popular ballets and divertissements for boulevard theatres and music halls throughout her life. Highly prolific, she created almost 300 ballets over a span of 50 years. While her life and work are not well documented in modern ballet history, contemporaries regarded her as one of the best choreographers of her time, lauding her as “French Fokine,” “model of choreographers,” and “most artistic of all dance-mistresses.”
