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 ReadingWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
The crowd of museum goers gathers around from multiple vantage points above and around the tiled, skylit courtyard of the Metropolitan Museum’s Robert Lehman Wing to view the dance performance. Perhaps they have just visited the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the gallery above and are curious to continue digging into the story of this black artist, enslaved for over two decades in the studio of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Maybe they have just learned that seventeeth-century southern Spain had a large enslaved Muslim population forcibly brought from Africa and associated with many of the artists’ workshops and households. And people of color (enslaved and free) accounted for a large percentage of the population and were quite visible in real and rendered everyday life. Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670) eventually negotiated his freedom and went on to become an artistic force in his own right.
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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 ReadingAn enduring image from Jody Oberfelder’s new site-specific dance “And Then, Now,” is of the lithe, 70-year-old choreographer perched up on a tall hill at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, framed by enormous trees and an expansive blue sky.
FREE ARTICLEJukebox musicals tend to come in two packages. The first centers a celebrity musician or musical group and uses the subject's body of work to tell a biographical narrative (“Carole King,” “The Temptations,” “The Four Seasons”).
FREE ARTICLEI may never know what it is like to be an octopus, but I can begin to imagine what it might be like if I was an octopus.[1] Equally, I may never know what it is like to be a dancer, and someone who communicates with their body, but, thanks to a special in-house showing of Prue Lang’s work-in-progress, “Poesis,” as part of her Australian Ballet’s residency program,[2] I can imagine what it might be like if I were. And so it was, that I found myself once more, in the late afternoon, in the van Praagh studio, of the Primrose...
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