All the World on Stage
It’s not often these days that aspiring dancers and smaller companies can enjoy the luxury of state-of-the-art facilities to develop their practice and put on a show, especially in a capital city.
Continue Reading
Latest
Into the Heart of the Cave
One of the gems of New York City’s dance landscape is the Graham Studio Series, a programming cycle that offers behind-the-scenes interaction with the work of the Graham Company in their studio space. In early January, the series presented a Graham Deconstructed event exploring Martha Graham’s modernist masterwork “Cave of the Heart.”
Continue Reading
The Legacy of Arlene Croce
Although Arlene Croce was not a trained dancer (her afterschool arts training in childhood was as a painter) she took dancing seriously as both an occasion for pleasure and a cultural endeavor, and she took writing about it to be a serious cultural action as well, at least as important to the mental health of the public as some of the verbiage by politicians and their editors.
Continue Reading
A Tale of Two Cities United by Dance
Philadelphia witnessed two Gala celebrations of dance and performance on opposite sides of town in October. It seemed like a tale of two cities. One in the center where much of the cultural events take place and the other on the fringes, down by the riverside.
Continue Reading
Dancing for Peace
Love will always win, absolutely, over war and everything else” says dancer Marta Kaliandruk keenly, her pure blue eyes sparkling as she speaks to me in the wings of the theatre, during dress rehearsal for the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Australian and New Zealand tour.
FREE ARTICLE
Life with a Capital L
During a bombing of Berlin in World War II, the young dancer Ludmilla Chiriaeff (née Otzoup Gorny) waited in a makeshift bomb shelter with her father. Alexander Otzoup was a writer and poet with a powerful imagination, who gathered regularly with other Russian émigrés to share work and talk.
FREE ARTICLE
Founding Fathers, Visionary Vignettes
Dance asks much of its spectators: there is a need for the intellectual side to work in tandem with the visceral. Which is why Yorke Dance Project's glorious film Dance Revolutionaries is a triumph from top to bottom—it's a feast for the senses. Filmed in various locations during the pandemic, there is as much to sate the casual dance fan as an aficionado. Director David Stewart has created a multifaceted work.
FREE ARTICLE
Sundays on Broadway
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Cathy Weis' “Sundays on Broadway,” a performance series that welcomes experimentation from a curated group of seasoned and emerging artists hosted intimately in Weis’ SoHo loft.
FREE ARTICLE
Pioneering Women
My first exposure to “Appalachian Spring” was the music—a sixth grade fieldtrip to the Denver Symphony Orchestra—long before I heard about Martha Graham.
Continue Reading
Disrupting Harm in Dance
In her 1951 autobiography Dance to the Piper, Agnes de Mille spends seven pages describing in colorful detail what it was like to be on the road with the Ballets Russes.
FREE ARTICLE
It’s All About Love
Six dancers enter from stage left and position themselves along the rear wall, their backs to the audience. Today, the light through a row of windows casts them in silhouette.
Continue Reading
Happy Birthday 92NY
The 92NY hosted a star-studded evening of dance on March 12th with performances by the Limón, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey II companies, as well as contemporary choreographers Omar Román de Jesús, Jamar Roberts, and Hope Boykin.
FREE ARTICLEFeatured Reads
Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
Continue Reading
The Me of Today
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
Continue Reading
Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
Continue Reading
America, F**K Yeah
After a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
Continue Reading
Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
Continue Reading