So Far So Good
The School of American Ballet is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. So is George Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade”—the first piece he made in America in 1934, choreographed on students from his brand-new academy.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
In her new biography, The Swans of Harlem, journalist Karen Valby is witness to the testimony of five pioneering Black ballerinas intimate with the founding history of Dance Theatre of Harlem. She shares their stories from childhood dreams to international stages to obscurity within the larger dance world with a palpable urgency. The mission seems to be somewhat contradictory: on one hand, to give these icons their due before it is too late and, on the other, to restore them to their rightful place in dance history. At intervals she reprises the realization of one of these ballerinas, Sheila Rohan, that she didn’t need to be the star ballerina—“It was enough that I was there. I was there. I was there.”
The School of American Ballet is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. So is George Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade”—the first piece he made in America in 1934, choreographed on students from his brand-new academy.
PlusSometimes there’s not much you’re able to say analytically about a dance work, and yet you know you’ve just witnessed a blood-guts-and-soul offering from an artist of the keenest kinaesthetic intelligence. Such was the case with gizeh muñiz vengel’s “auiga,” second on a double bill finale for the ARC Edge residency at San Francisco’s CounterPulse.
PlusThe Australian Museum Mammalogy Collection holds ten specimens of the Bramble Cay Melomys collected from 1922–24, when they were in abundance. One hundred years later, a familiar photo of a wide-eyed, mosaic-tailed Melomys, the first native mammal to become extinct due to the impacts of climate change, greets me as I enter the Arts House foyer.
FREE ARTICLEPre-pandemic, queerness and ballet were two terms not often put together. So, when choreographer Adriana Pierce started bringing a community of queer-identifying people together on Zoom—cis women, trans people of all genders, and nonbinary dancers—it felt like a watershed moment for many of them.
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Thank you for this detailed, thoughtful, and thought provoking review of a complex and groundbreaking chapter of ballet history. I learned a lot. It makes me want to read The Swans of Harlem to learn much more.