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INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Simone Forti: Fortissimo

“It was packed and I was surprised at the kind of adoration I received. But it seemed like people were responding to the work and it felt good. It [also] scared me a little bit.”

INTERVIEWS | By Rachel Howard

Tamara Rojo leads San Francisco Ballet

On January 19th, San Francisco Ballet opens its 90th season—its first under new artistic director, Tamara Rojo. Rojo is new to many San Francisco dance viewers but a near-household name to ballet fans in Europe, where she began her dancing career with the English National Ballet, ascended to stardom at the Royal Ballet, and then returned to ENB in 2012 to serve as both artistic director and principal dancer, raising the company’s profile from a regional touring troupe to an international newsmaker, particularly by prioritizing women’s choreographic voices and by commissioning Akram Khan to radically reinvent the Romantic era staple...

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Dancing All Over Town with Heidi Duckler

The reigning goddess of Southern California site-specific dance, the indefatigable Heidi Duckler, began her terpsichorean journey in 1985 in Los Angeles. Originally dubbed Collage Dance Theatre, the troupe, now Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD), began its storied history in, well, a laundromat. That work, “Laundromatinee,” originally staged in 1988 in Santa Monica’s Thrifty Wash Laundromat, featured dancers performing amid washing machines, dryers and a bevy of onlookers, intentional or not.

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Marina Harss

Why Dance Matters

Mindy Aloff’s new book Why Dance Matters is part of a series, published by Yale University Press, on why this or that thing should matter to the reader. The series has already taken on such subjects as architecture, translation, poetry, and acting. And as of next January, it will include Aloff’s meditation on the many ways dance enters and alters our lives. At different points in her career, Aloff has been a poet, a dance critic, an essayist, a teacher, the editor of the anthology Dance in America, and the author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation....

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Painting the Planet: Lita and Jasmine Albuquerque

While the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale recently closed—and with it, Lita Albuquerque’s collateral event, “Liquid Light,” a multi-dimensional experience featuring the world premiere of a film of the same name and starring her daughter, dancer, and choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque—their filial collaboration is the continuation of a decades-long partnership that began, well, in the womb.

INTERVIEWS | By Victoria Looseleaf

Bella Lewitzky: Dance Maven and Maverick

While the intersection of film and dance has been on the rise, most recently because of the global pandemic, Los Angeles-based Bridget Murnane has been working in those two arenas for years: She was not only a professional dancer in the 1980s, having performed with, among others, Gloria Newman, but she also earned a master’s degree in dance from UCLA in 1985, where her thesis was video as a choreographic tool.

INTERVIEWS | By Veronica Posth

Finding Out

Out Innerspace Dance Theatre is devoted to creating exciting and integral contemporary-dance works. Through their research and experimentation, the Vancouver-based company celebrates the importance of challenging preconceptions of what is to be experienced and expounded in contemporary dance-theatre. The company was officially formed in 2007 by David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, after years of various collaborative endeavours together. During a pleasant conversation with Raymond, I had the opportunity to ask him for some more detailed information about the company, the process of creation of their last work, their methodology, and upcoming productions.

INTERVIEWS | By Apollinaire Scherr

Making Meaning with Neil Greenberg

In 1994, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, Neil Greenberg premiered what has become his best- known work, “Not-About-AIDS-Dance.” Over the heads of the five dancers, surtitles narrated—in sans serif type and the most laconic terms—what had been happening in the dancers’ lives outside rehearsal as well as what was happening right before us on the stage: the wide lunges, wheeling legs, windmilling arms, supplicant kneels, reckless penchés, and bouts of stillness more rash than anything you’d see in Cunningham, with whom Greenberg had danced for seven years, beginning in 1979.

FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | By Candice Thompson

Team Spirit

When the Paul Taylor Dance Company returns to Lincoln Center November 1-13, iconic Taylor dances like “Esplanade” and “Company B” share the stage with world premieres from Amy Hall Garner and newly-appointed resident choreographer Lauren Lovette. Other highlights of the programming include a special evening celebrating the collaboration between Taylor and the painter Alex Katz, Kurt Jooss’s classic anti-war ballet “The Green Table,” and live music from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, led by maestro David LaMarche.

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Martha Anne Toll

Searching for Mr. B

Jennifer Homans, The New Yorker’s dance critic, has written a must-read biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. While plenty of ink has been spilled about the iconic choreographer, what makes Homans’s work distinct is her ability to get inside his head and capture his spiritual and personal life in graceful, poetic prose. Reading this monumental work felt like a full-bodied experience.

BOOKSHELF | INTERVIEWS | By Martha Anne Toll

The Dancer and her Writing Life

Meg Howrey’s engaging new novel, They’re Going to Love You—her fourth—immerses readers in the ballet world. As a former ballerina, this is a place with which Howrey is intimately familiar. The plot revolves around a 40-something choreographer/erstwhile dancer, Carlisle, and her estranged father and his partner, James, both of whom are also in the dance world.

INTERVIEWS | By Karen Greenspan

For Mythili Prakash, Bharatanatyam is Personal

Squeezing in as much time as possible together in the dance studio, Mythili Prakash and her collaborating musicians are rehearsing their new work “Poo | Poo” for the Erasing Borders Dance Festival. Presented annually in New York City by the Indo-American Arts Council, the festival, this year, is celebrating India’s 75th anniversary of independence. Four days away from the premiere, Prakash and her musicians are still figuring out the ending. But that may be because of the collaborative nature of this endeavor (as well as the fact that half of them were stricken with Covid during one of their dedicated...

Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Lorna Irvine

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,...

INTERVIEWS | Marina Harss

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.

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.

REVIEWS | Faye Arthurs

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.

REVIEWS | Emily May

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.