Photo: Anna Halprin with young Daria on stairs leading down to the dance deck, Halprin Home, Kentfield, CA, c. 1950s. Photograph by Lawrence Halprin (Permission of the Halprin Family). If there is a single object that sets the body dancing, it is a set of stairs. Domestically, functionally, theatrically, stairs allow the . . .
Read More
Douglas Dunn on the cover of the first edition of Sally Banes’s Terpsichore in Sneakers (1980). Photographer: Robert Alexander. To better understand the origins of contemporary Italian dance, Italian critics, dancers, and choreographers are now examining the American presence in the Italian dance world of the 1970s.[1] In 1969 Fabio Sargentini inaugurated The Danza Volo . . .
Read MoreThe Ballad of Emmett Till explores the life and afterlife of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955. He goes by the nickname Bo or BoBo and he stutters. Like the African bata “talking drum,” his stammer is percussive, a rapid-fire repetition, . . .
Read More
Ava Sautter and Aarón Sanz in Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. Photo credit: Erin Baiano. With permission of The New York City Ballet. The Fall 2023 season of New York City Ballet’s seventy-fifth anniversary year was themed Foundations, the Winter 2024 season Evolutions, and the Spring 2024 season the Future. This spring futurity . . .
Read More
Photo: The Dante Project, Opera National de Paris, Germain Louvet (Dante) and Hanna O’Neill (Beatrice). Act Two. (© Ann Ray/OnP). Courtesy of Opera National de Paris. More than a century ago, in his essay “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante,” the legendary literary critic Erich Auerbach, observed that, “Dante is far from . . .
Read More
Photo: Yuka Iseda of Philadelphia Ballet in “Giselle,” choreography by Angel Corella. Photo by Alexander Iziliaev. With permission of The Philadelphia Ballet. The charmingly historical Academy of Music with its gilt and red décor was an ideal frame for The Philadelphia Ballet’s production of Giselle. It is subtitled “a pantomime ballet,” which recalls . . .
Read More
Photo: Desmond Richardson. Photo credit: Gene Schiavone. Courtesy of the photographer. Excerpt from Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 248 pp., April 2024. Flung out and dispersed in the Diaspora, one has a sense of being touched by or glimpsed from this door. As . . .
Read More
Adrian Danchig-Waring in George Balanchine’s Apollo. Photo credit: Erin Baiano. Courtesy of the New York City Ballet. Not surprisingly, the program for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New York City Ballet will give us an opportunity to look both backwards and forwards. The Fall program is dubbed “The Foundation,” and the coming . . .
Read More
Yunchan Lim of South Korea performs during the Preliminary round at the Sixteenth Cliburn International Piano Competition in Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Ralph Lauer) This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s birth. It is also one year since Yunchan Lim . . .
Read More
Photo: Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring in George Balanchine’s Agon. Photographer: Erin Baiano. Courtesy of the New York City Ballet. Individual items of a repertory mutate happily in the hands of the individuals who perform them. In Of Late Style, Edward Said described this process as akin to rhetorical inventio, which he . . .
Read More