Award-winning ballet director Marco Goecke from the Hanover State Opera has been suspended after smearing dog faeces on a critic's face, Daily Mail reports. Goecke, apparently furious about a review of one of his shows by journalist Wiebke Hüster, allegedly confronted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung critic during the half-time break of another show and smeared a paper bag filled with dog excrement on her face. Ms Hüster described Mr Goecke's show, 'In The Dutch Mountains' opened recently at the Nederlands Dans Theatre in The Hague, like being "alternately driven mad and killed by boredom". When the director attacked her, she said she couldn't defend herself, as she was in panic, she told NDR.

Birmingham Royal Ballet director Carlos Acosta and Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi came up with an unusual idea - to pair Black Sabbath music and ballet dancing. Luckily, the idea is coming to fruition - 'Black Sabbath the Ballet' will premiere in Birmingham in September. It will feature eight Black Sabbath tracks - 'Paranoid', 'War Pigs', 'Orchid' and 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' among them, re-orchestrated for the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, plus new music inspired by the band.

A beautiful story in BBC about ballerina Ilmira Bagrautinova from the world-renowned Mariinsky Theatre who, dressed in full costume, performs scenes from Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake' - on the frozen Gulf of Finland. It's her eco-protest against the construction of a port in Batareinaya Bay, a popular beach about 100 km west of St Petersburg. Bagrautinova told the BBC "we are hoping that nature, beauty and harmony will triumph".

Spanish charity Asociacion Musica para Despertar (Music Association for Awakening), which tries to improve the lives of dementia patients with music, has released a video of Alzheimer’s patient Marta Gonzalez, a former prima ballerina, who is transformed as she listens to Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake'. Madam Gonzalez passed away shortly after this video was filmed.

BBC has a nice video-article about the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first Black classical ballet company, founded by Arthur Mitchell in a converted garage in Harlem in 1969. They talked to Virginia Johnson, one of the first dancers to join the company, now DTH's artistic director, who says that at the beginning "there were […]