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.
Continua a leggereWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
I would like to speak about power. Not the power of a choreographer (famous or not) in the dance studio, which has been analyzed and discussed exhaustively and to useful effect here and here and here, among many other places, but the power of a respected critic in America’s leading newspaper. As the New York Times’s dance critic, Gia Kourlas writes about dance evocatively, skillfully, and yet, in the case of her April 5 Critic’s Notebook, “Finding Freedom and Feminism in Ballet. (It’s Possible.),” with a bias so profound that the piece reads as if we are living in the upside-down. Tellingly the article’s featured image of George Balanchine coaching a dancer cuts off the woman’s face. Only her body is visible.
Illustration by Daria Domnikova
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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.
Continua a leggereAn 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.
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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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