Excerpt from La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 688 pp., April 2022. No sooner had Nijinska arrived in Monte Carlo than she started work on Les Biches—“The Does” is one translation—her most important Diaghilev-era creation after Les Noces and one that remains in repertory. The music was by . . .
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Director and curator Carl Hancock Rux. Photographer Ifa Bayeza Carl Hancock Rux is a tour de force. We first met at a Theatre Communications Guild panel in 1998. That day, he invited me to his concert performance which launched Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater on October 16. I did attend that . . .
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Kevork Mourad. By kind permission from the artist. One of the most significant and exciting developments of 2019 and 2020 in the American theatre has been the formation of the Middle Eastern and North African Theatre Makers Alliance (MENATMA). Years of creating, organizing, theorizing, and advocating have culminated in an American Middle . . .
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Taidō Shūfū, Ensō (19th century) (Detail). Hanging scroll; ink on paper, 11 1/16 in x 24 5/16 in. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Let’s talk about the last movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata. This is a very, very difficult thing to do. One, because you’re already thinking of this piece as a . . .
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Photo: Nikolai Aistov as the Rajah, Julia Sedova as Gamzatti and Pavel Gerdt as Solor (ca. 1902). Courtesy of the Marius Petipa Society. We have recently seen a conflict over a Depression-era mural on the wall of a public school in San Francisco. It came under attack by the student body for . . .
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Classic Sin: Ballet, Sex, and Dancing Outside the Canon Photo: Valerie Robin and Fabrice Calmels in Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain. Photograph by and courtesy of Herbert Migdoll. What makes a ballet a classic? Is it earning a permanent place in the history books, or is it being worthy of the Herculean investment of . . .
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Photo: Valerie Robin and Fabrice Calmels in Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain. Photograph by and courtesy of Herbert Migdoll. Classic Sin: Ballet, Sex, and Dancing Outside the Canon What makes a ballet a classic? Is it earning a permanent place in the history books, or is it being worthy of the Herculean investment . . .
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Against Orthodoxies Photo: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921, oil on canvas, 59.5 cm x 59.5 cm.[1] I discovered George Orwell’s post-Hiroshima, early Cold War essay “Politics and the English Language” as I prepared to enter a doctoral program in dance.[2] It taught me that original thinking was going to . . .
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Photo: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921, oil on canvas, 59.5 cm x 59.5 cm.[1] Against Orthodoxies I discovered George Orwell’s post-Hiroshima, early Cold War essay “Politics and the English Language” as I prepared to enter a doctoral program in dance.[2] It taught me that original thinking was . . .
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On the Intolerable in Dance Photo: Marcha Ni una menos, Buenos Aires, 2018 I recently saw Angelin Preljocaj’s Rite of Spring (2001) on film. This was the latest of many ballets staged by the French choreographer from the repertoire of the Ballets Russes. Earlier Preljocaj had offered the world his Le Spectre de la Rose, L’Oiseau . . .
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