Eye Candy
’Tis the season, so it would be churlish to pick holes in Christopher Hampson's glorious confection, adapted from Peter Darrell's iconic work.
FREE ARTICLEWorld-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.”
’Tis the season, so it would be churlish to pick holes in Christopher Hampson's glorious confection, adapted from Peter Darrell's iconic work.
FREE ARTICLELike two cicadas advancing, springing instep with each other, Tra Mi Dinh and Rachel Coulson manifest from the shadows of the deep stage of the new Union Theatre.
Continue Reading“I can’t even stand it,” exclaimed Tina Finkelman Berkett about the Perenchio Foundation grant that her dance troupe, BodyTraffic, recently received.
Continue ReadingBeneath a tree also over a century old is where I meet dancer and artist Eileen Kramer, and where the 60-minute loop will end. And it feels fitting, on the heels of her recent death on November 15, 2024, at 110-years-of-age, to start here, at effectively the end of Sue Healey’s screening of On View: Icons.
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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.