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A Life in Dance
BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

A Life in Dance

Gavin Larsen was a professional dancer for eighteen years, first with Pacific Northwest Ballet, then with Alberta Ballet and Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and finally and most significantly, for Oregon Ballet Theatre. She was never famous, but she had a good career, a career any dancer can be proud of. She has just written a memoir, Being a Ballerina, the Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life, published by the University Press of Florida. It is a quietly engrossing book, the reading of which feels like peeking through the keyhole into a life in dance. It is not a life to be...

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Vision of Change
INTERVIEWS | Par Josephine Minhinnett

Vision of Change

Toronto-based choreographer and dancemaker Esie Mensah says that she likes to “poke people with her art.” You’ll know what she means if you’ve seen any of her previous creations, such as A Revolution of Love, in which a crew of Black female dancers take over Fort York National Historic Site in celebratory Afro-fusion movement.

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Duke Dang Leads Works & Process through the Storm
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Duke Dang Leads Works & Process through the Storm

For fifteen years, Duke Dang has been the bright, capable force behind Works & Process, a series that offers behind-the-scenes conversations about the creative process. Regularly, choreographers, composers, and designers have converged upon the postage-stamp-sized theater beneath the Guggenheim Museum to discuss their work and to show sneak peeks of premieres.[1]

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Belinda McGuire: Choose Your Own Adventure
DANCE FILM | INTERVIEWS | Par Veronica Posth

Belinda McGuire: Choose Your Own Adventure

Belinda McGuire is a dance artist who splits her time between her native Toronto and Brooklyn. As a teen she danced with Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre, before going on to build a career as an independent dance artist. A creative force, Belinda has produced and launched several one-woman shows, and performed as a company member with Doug Varone and Dancers, Gallim Dance, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Anne Plamondon, and Joshua Beamish's MoveTheCompany.

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Taylor Stanley: The Space to Think
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Taylor Stanley: The Space to Think

Like all the dancers at New York City Ballet, Taylor Stanley has been away from the company’s studios for much of the last year. Most of that time, he’s been in New York, where he lives with his sweet dog, Theo. The break has given him time to reflect, but that’s nothing new. Stanley is as thoughtful offstage as he is internal onstage. He dances as if he were digging toward some very deep and quiet place within. For a few years, he has been exploring different ways of moving, outside of ballet. He’s attracted to Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique,...

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Rise from the Ashes
INTERVIEWS | Par Lorna Irvine

Rise from the Ashes

Penny Chivas is a superb Glasgow-based dancer and activist whose work is graceful, insightful and challenging. Her current project, “Burnt Out,” interrogates the effects of Australian bush fires, with particular emphasis on trauma, in terms of both body and the environment. Plans for the piece were put on hiatus because of travel restrictions in the wake of the pandemic. Lorna Irvine caught up with her—socially distanced, outdoors—to talk with her about her career so far, and plans for when current restrictions are lifted in the UK.

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Toni Basil, Dancing through the Decades
INTERVIEWS | Par Victoria Looseleaf

Toni Basil, Dancing through the Decades

Quentin Tarantino called her the “Goddess of Go-Go.” Indeed, when the acclaimed director hired dancer, choreographer, singer, and actress Toni Basil to make dances for his 2019 film, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, choosing Basil was a no-brainer. After all, this polymath, who was born in 1943 and is still going strong at 77, not only has cred in the swinging ‘60s, but has also been relevant for six—count ‘em, yes six—decades.

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Christopher Wheeldon: Making Dances in a Pandemic
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Christopher Wheeldon: Making Dances in a Pandemic

The last decade of Christopher Wheeldon’s career has gone by in a blur. The global nature of the ballet world means that he is constantly on the move, finishing one project even as another is taking shape somewhere else, demanding his attention. When the pandemic hit, he had two enormous projects on the way, a new evening-length ballet for the Royal Ballet in London, and a musical headed to Broadway. Both are now on hold until theaters open again. But he hasn’t been idle. In 2020, he took on several projects, most of them far less formal or elaborate than...

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Tamisha Guy: Reaching Out
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Tamisha Guy: Reaching Out

When I caught up with Tamisha Guy, in mid-January, she was in the middle of a creative residency at Kaatsbaan with the company of which she is a member, A.I.M. It was her day off, and she had been on a walk around the gorgeous grounds, once home to a horse farm belonging to Eleanor Roosevelt’s grandparents. Last summer, a simple wooden stage was erected in the middle of the main meadow there, making it possible to hold an outdoor dance festival.  Tamisha Guy performed on that stage with her friend and former colleague Lloyd Knight, of the Martha Graham...

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Manuel Legris leads La Scala Ballet
INTERVIEWS | Par Valentina Bonelli

Manuel Legris leads La Scala Ballet

Officially appointed director of La Scala Ballet on December 1st, Manuel Legris has been working with the company since last autumn. Thanks to him, the dancers, after many months in lockdown away from the theatre, could resume their daily training. Their discipline has been such that the troupe remains Covid-free, in spite of more than 50 cases being recorded among the chorus and the orchestra.

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Stella Abrera, on Moving Forward, Steadily and with Grit
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Stella Abrera, on Moving Forward, Steadily and with Grit

In early March of 2020 the American Ballet Theatre principal Stella Abrera was in St. Petersburg, Russia, setting Alexei Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas” on the Mariinsky Ballet. She was so busy in the studio, she told me a few months later, that she was barely conscious of what was happening in the larger world around her. That is until her husband, former ABT soloist Sascha Radetsky—now director of the Studio Company—called to say he had booked her on the next flight out of St. Petersburg. Hers was one of the last flights to leave Russia in those days when the seriousness...

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Bijayini Satpathy on her Transformative Year
INTERVIEWS | Par Marina Harss

Bijayini Satpathy on her Transformative Year

I’ve been meaning to do this for months, but I’m only getting around to it now. I’ve come to think of this strange expansion of time as “Covid time.” The “this” that I’m referring to is a series of check-ins with dancers and choreographers, a way to hear about what they’ve been up to during the past however-many-months since the pandemic began. Everyone has reacted differently. There are the hyper-productive artists, who have been busy creating dance videos and teaching and planning Zoom seminars. There are the depressed ones, who are just gritting their teeth and watching the months melt away....

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

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.

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