GreatLinks
This page is a will build to become a repository of links to great pieces about the dance that’s happening today and also in the past - so not so much the sites that you might easily find in casual dance searches, but lesser known sites that should not be lost.
I’m thinking particularly of sites that have stopped being developed and yet are repositories of terrific/interesting coverage of the past and the way the net has responded to dance and the ever-changing scene around it.
As such, the page will be updated regularly and never declared finished. Note that new additions to this page will always be at the top.
Great Sites & Pages
Photo © Internet Archive WayBack Machine
1990 Royal Ballet School Documentary: “A Place to Dance”)
This documentary about the Royal Ballet School is a terrific piece of London ballet nostalgia and a spot the young dancer/choreographer game… and where they have got to all these years on.
Filmed 34 years ago, A Place to Dance shows the Lower School at White Lodge and the Upper School at Barons Court (in Hammersmith), which is also where The Royal Ballet was based at the time. It features lots of little quotes from both the students and staff. Merle Park was in charge of the school at that time.
Here are some of the students you might recognise: Christopher Wheeldon, Christopher Hampson, Laura Morera, David Dawson, Monica Zamora, Robert Parker and many more.
For many years the video was on YouTube, if oddly in 2 parts: one 27 minutes long (the link given here) and a separate one for the final few minutes. Sadly, both videos seem to have been taken down, but the 27-minute video has been preserved on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810114731/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECaAxDhJguU
If anybody is aware of a full version of the documentary on the linkable web, or just the final few minutes version, do contact me, and I will add it to this page. Thank you.
ismeneb.com
Ismene Brown’s marvellous repository of her dance writing - “An archive of 25 years of British dance” is the subhead. More substantively: “This site holds a selection of my published observations of the British and visiting international dance and ballet scene during my 30+ years as the dance critic of the Daily & Sunday Telegraph, The Arts Desk and The Spectator, and as the Telegraph’s dance obituarist.”
Photo © Ismene Brown.
A terrific website to just dip into and be astounded at the sheer depth of coverage Ismene achieved in writing at the highest level for so long. The only caveat is that many of the links go to The Telegraph site that normally looks for a subscription to view, but sometimes just knowing of an article (and its title) means you can find/investigate ways to read it for free.
But here is something you can read immediately - her wonderful interview with critic Clement Crisp as a Word document (and you can see the page as it appeared on Balletco here.)
As a long term backup, here is a link to the ismeneb.com site as indexed by the Internet Archive WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ismeneb.com/