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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
Join us Thursday, December 10, at 8pm Eastern Time for our free Virtual Gathering of Native American Voices. With Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Elise Paschen, Toni Jensen, and Tacey M. Atsitty, moderated by Laura Furlan, the reading will hand over the mic to contemporary Indigenous voices, rather than cosplay Pilgrims, during the . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
Sex and Death Photo: Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in Agon (1957) by George Balanchine. Photo by Martha Swope ©The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Several nineteenth-century story ballets that have survived the passage of time have similar scenarios. In Giselle (1841), a nobleman groomed to marry a woman he doesn’t much care . . .
Read More
Introduction: The Classic and the Offending Classic Cover Image: William Blake, Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing. (circa 1786). Pencil and watercolor, 1’7” x 2’ 3” [From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream] Last year, dance historian Mark Franko published an essay in the Massachusetts Review on Jerome Robbins’s Opus Jazz, where he argued that Robbins uses Black aesthetic . . .
Read More
There is no denying that Polish poetry occupies a special place in the United States. Embraced by non-specialists and critics alike, the works of Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski have played a role in shaping the aesthetic of American poetry in the twentieth century. Anecdotal evidence sugg ests . . .
Read More
MAJESTIC SALOON & HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE AAUP PRESENT:What’s Happening at Hampshire?: A Teach-in, Poetry Reading, & Dance Party Wednesday, December 4, 7:00-10:00 pm, Majestic Saloon, Northampton Last spring, many students, staff, faculty, and alums of Hampshire College successfully organized to resist a proposed merger and likely closure of Hampshire College. Now, almost a . . .
Read More
When Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes presented The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, an unsuspecting Belle Époque audience was shocked. The premiere of Sacre is the stuff of legend, with audiences hissing and screaming obscenities, and the dancers stunned and unable to hear Igor Stravinsky’s music, . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Five) Lesson Six: I Must Be Mistaken Amazingly, the MOOC I took graded students based solely on peer reviews. In fact, this is the case in every course Coursera offers that requires students to complete assignments that “do not . . .
Read More